Cultural Resources -----
Virgin Islands National Park and Coral Reef National Monument
By Ken Wild, VINP Archeologist

Originally the Virgin Islands National Park was established for its natural beauty and recreational resources. Since then, the Park Service has become aware of the rich cultural resources in the Park with landscapes that are the most all-inclusive and culturally diverse in the National Park System. Virgin Islands National Park has since revised management plans to reflect these significant cultural resources that collectively preserve a comprehensive picture of the Caribbean’s human heritage and development from prehistory to the present, on land and underwater.

Significant prehistoric sites are present on almost every beach and in every bay within the Park. These archeological sites date from as early as 840 BC to the arrival of Columbus. Across this temporal landscape, there are early nomadic hunter-gather Archaic Period sites, followed by a proliferation of early chiefdom villages, then complex ceremonial sites and each with their own burial grounds. Only two prehistoric sites have been investigated in the Park, Cinnamon Bay and Trunk Bay. However, these sites have given us a greater understanding of this Caribbean region’s prehistory, and the religious and social development of the Taino culture that greeted Columbus into the New World. In addition, these two sites have dramatically increased our understanding of the ancient rock art that is found throughout the Caribbean islands. We now know when Caribbean rock art was carved, why they were carved in these specific areas, (such as those found in the Park at Reef Bay), their purpose, religious meaning, and how they reflect cultural development.

After Columbus’s arrival, the Virgin Island’s became one of the first melting pots made up of many cultures from around the world. This is especially evident in the historic record of the lands that make up Virgin Islands National Park. Historic landscapes and architectural remains of hundreds of historic structures from sugar, cotton, indigo, and coffee estates are found throughout the Park. Estate structures on these colonial landscapes include: sugar works consisting of windmills, animal mills, black smith and carpenter shops, estate cemeteries, factories, curing houses, cisterns, bagasse sheds; rum, cotton, tobacco, coffee and indigo works; stables, great houses, bake ovens, manager houses, gate houses, estate hospitals, wells and troughs, privies, terrace walls, cook houses, masonry animal pens, watermills, and warehouses. In addition to these plantations are at least two thousand house sites that were occupied by the enslaved workers and their graveyards.

Preserved within this colonial setting is the infrastructure of government and community buildings consisting of: historic bridges, cemeteries, stock yards, wharfs, roads, schools for enslaved children, aqueducts and catchments, dams, boat building structures, boat houses, dock yards, leprosarium, yellow fever hospitals and a slave revolt battlefield. Moreover, there are barracks, batteries, forts, guard houses, a pharmacy and a small pox quarantine station. Notably, all of these 1801 military sites are the only Napoleonic sites on American soil. Included in this infrastructure are the remains of all the ships that sank in park or monument waters that once shipped, supplied, and protected these holdings. This maritime heritage also includes the oldest surviving steam powered marine railway in the world, Britain’s Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, and several historic coaling stations that are the direct link to the American presence in the Virgin Islands.

As the Virgin Islands shift into the 19th and 20th century the Park’s landscape inherits a new set of structures dedicated to bay rum production, charcoal processing, and cattle ranching and one of the first US naval stations in the islands. Within each of these settings, from the Archaic Period to the US Navy stations there is also a well preserved buried record that can provide the details to the stories of each of these unique sites.

As a whole, Virgin Islands National Park encompasses over half the island of St. John and almost all of Hassel Island, providing unrestricted lands upon which rests the temporal stories of the prehistoric past, and where over a hundred historic sites come together to complete the most undisturbed and comprehensive Caribbean landscapes a National Park can preserve for future generations.

Preserved cultural resource themes that extend across the Park’s cultural landscape
1)   The first humans arrive in the Virgin Islands, 1000 BC- 200 BC.
2)   The first village settlers of the islands, 200BC-AD 600.
3)   Population explosion and village expansion across the landscape, AD 600-1200.
4)   Development of the complex Taino Culture, AD 1200 to 1492.
5)   Contact Period first between Taino and Carib followed by Spanish and the demise of pre-Columbian culture, AD1450 to 1550.
6)   European expansion into the Caribbean and the age of Piracy and Privateers particularly from park owned lands, AD 1580 to 1700.
7)   Early European settlement of St. Thomas/Hassel Island and St. John, AD 1665-1733.
8)   Expansion of sugar, cotton, slavery and maritime commerce, AD 1733 to 1840s.
9)   The Napoleonic War and British occupation, AD 1801 to 1815.
10) Underground railway period marked by guardhouses and escape routes, AD 1839-1848
11) Emancipation, the end of the sugar and cotton industry and the introduction of bay rum, cattle, and charcoal production and a new era of maritime commercial expansion, AD 1840s to 1917.
12) American “Naval Regime”, AD 1917-1931. Naval Base established on Hassel Island.
13) World War II military installations on Hassel Island, 1940s.
14) AD 1920s to 1950s, visitors from the United States begin to discover and move to the Virgin Islands. Tourism becomes the island’s major source of commerce and industry, and Tektite, one of the nation’s first astronaut training facility and underwater habitat is established in the Park, AD 1950s to present.

Park archeologist Ken Wild heads Virgin Islands National Park archeology. Ken has worked for the Park Service for thirty years, having conducted investigations in most of the parks of the Southeast Region. On St. John he is known for his investigations at Cinnamon Bay and his work on improving understanding of the region's petroglyphs. Ken is aided by interns, who are provided for by the Friends of the Park.