Archeologist Louisa Daggers is on mission to safeguard cultural...

This will help them better understand their culture, identity and place in society which is important if they are going to talk about advocacy for human rights, indigeneity, self-determination and everything else.”

She said it was important people understand the cultural dynamics of the landscape of their ancestors and preserving that heritage. “We are trying all the conservation approaches. We are also responding to loss by obtaining tangible records of what was there.”

Shell mining

Daggers and a colleague from the Kanuku Mountains Communities Representative Group are to make a presentation at a conference on the vulnerability of the Caribbean and climate change in Aruba in November. “We are approaching it from an archeological and a traditional knowledge perspective, what the archeological record is saying about climate change and how we can use that collectively to inform the present and future.”

For the 14 or 15 years she has worked with Plew, she said their efforts were on the north western shores’ middens of Regions One and Two where they looked at how people adapted to changes. While the shell mounds are a wonderful archive of pre-historic information, she said, “Unfortunately, there is not a lot of emphasis on conservation by the authorities so many of them are not well preserved. Some people fill their yards with the shell middens.”

Daggers noted the Wyva Creek shell midden in the Barama River, which was a huge mound, has been completely mined out. I was only able to collect data from a part of it.”

The shell midden is an accumulation of diet and burial records which also gives an insight into tools used at the time.

Of the human remains excavated by Williams from Barabina (Region One) and Pyraka (St Monica) shell middens, Daggers said, “We have been looking at that for the last 13 or 14 years and have found they are a great archive for environmental data, climate data and human adaptation. We gathered that prehistoric people would have experienced multiple episodes of climate change. We are now going to use that record and try to bridge the gap between traditional knowledge and archeology.”

Second edition, Archeology of Guyana

Daggers co-authored the second edition of The Archeology of Guyana with Plew, who authored the first edition in 2005.

In 2015, UG had funding from the World Bank for research to inform policy under the UG STS (Science, Technology and Society) project.

She convinced Plew to apply for the US$50,000 grant to look at low carbon environment using the archeological record to see if prehistoric populations had any role in climate change.

The application was successful and the grant allowed them to go back to Siriki to continue the excavations they had begun in 2011, to explore Little Canaballi in Barama which was never excavated before and to return to Wyva Creek to supplement the data they had.

They pulled Williams’ Barabina, Pyraka and the Waramuri collections, which were much larger collections than they have today and set benchmarks for analysis to see what they would uncover.

“We sampled so much of the stuff, we had a lot of findings we didn’t expect. We were also able to deduce that the people moved sediments from one place to the next and that 7,000 or 8,000 years ago they fired the landscape for hunting and farming in the same way it is still being done in the Rupununi.”

For the project, Daggers did the data analysis in Idaho in October, 2016, when she also learned to prepare samples and work with experts in isotopes about what the results were saying. That was when Plew said he was thinking about publishing a second edition to the Archeology of Guyana and he wanted Daggers to coauthor it. She agreed.

When approached, even though the manuscript was good, the UG Press was not sure it would sell because it was about archeology, not a popular subject. When Professor Dr Paloma Mohamed took over the vice chancellorship, Daggers wrote to her about the issue and she responded favourably. The book was launched in August. “It was a proud moment for us knowing that UG Press is the home of The Archeology of Guyana (Second Edition). The response to it has been good.”