Archeology Homepage

The beach at Cinnamon Bay is eroding. It was critical to recover the remains of the island's historic and prehistoric past before they disappeared forever. The importance of this project is documented in papers published by Archeologist Ken Wild:

2003 - INVESTIGATIONS AT CINNAMON BAY ST. JOHN, U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS AND SOCIAL IDEOLOGY IN THE VIRGIN ISLANDS AS REFLECTED IN PRECOLUMBIAN CERAMICS

2004 - UNDERSTANDING THE PETROGLYPHS

2005 - The Shoreline Settlement at Cinnamon Bay, St. John, U.S.V.I.: A Small Estate Established Before formal Colonization and Burned During the Slave Rebellion of 1733 (a paper presented by Dr. Doug Armstrong at the 2003 Conference of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Current events are reported by our Archeology interns in a Web Log (BLOG).

Recovery of the site data and objects associated with the islands ancestry was completed in 2001 thanks to the Virgin Islands National Park, the Friends of the Park and funding provided by Donald Sussman. Now is the time for cataloging and analysis.

You still have a chance to participate!

Maybe you have some curiosity; or possibly at one time you considered archaeology as a career. Well here on beautiful St. John, scientists working at Cinnamon Bay have started to uncover 500 years of ceremonial activity of the Tainos, the Indians that met Columbus, as well as historic remains of Danish plantation ruins. (For more information on the plantation period, see A Documentary History of the Cinnamon Bay Plantation 1718 - 1917 ).

While the excavation portion of the Cinnamon Bay project ended in June 2001, there is still time to satisfy that curiosity and visit one of the many other sites of active historic preservation. If you have time, join in and take part in discovering and preserving these fascinating chapters of the island's rich history. Click here to see current volunteer opportunities.