Debate on Taino-Maya contacts heats up in 1999

As early as the year 1999 after much work at the Buchillones Taino archeological site in Cuba the Canadian archeologist David Pendergast publicly speculated that a curious object being held at the Royal Ontario Museum as part of a collection of items found by him years earlier in the Altun Ha Maya archeological site of Belize was in fact a Taino manatee-bone vomic spatula of the kind that ancient Taino shamans and chiefs used to induce vomiting in their purification rituals.

His comment sparked debate on the subject and doubts were raised by experts such as University of Manitoba archeologist Louis Adair, who objected that the Classic Era Maya period represented by the Altun Ha archeological site came and went before the rise of the Classic Taino period in Cuba and elsewhere several centuries later which is characterized by the use of vomic spatulas. Dr. Bill Keegan, curator of Caribbean archeology at Florida Museum of natural History tends to agree with Adair but cautions that pre-classic Taino ancestors in the Caribbean may already have been using primitive less sophisticated versions of the vomic spatulas earlier in their history before the full-classic Taino culture had developed. These early spatulas may then have found their way to a classic-era Maya site through cultural interaction.

http://www.cubanet.org/CNews/y99/ago99/16e12.htm

Now there is even more evidence arising which supports early contact between the Caribbean Tainos and the Mayas of the Ycatan peninsula.

Posted by Antonio Aj Ik's associate, Miguel Sague