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“As soon as the organism dies, the DNA starts to degrade, especially in really hot areas,” he says.

Because of their age and Hispaniola’s hot, humid environment, he knew it was unlikely that any nuclear DNA, an organism’s full genetic blueprint, had survived. He extracted genetic material from several of the fragments labeled as cow teeth. John Seaton Callahan/Getty ImagesĪ few years ago, Florida Museum of Natural History zooarchaeologist Nicolas Delsol, studying the Spanish introduction of cattle to the Americas, turned to the bits of bone and tooth in the Puerto Real collection. More than 100,000 bone fragments, mostly from cattle, have been collected from the site, which included a large tannery that, says Deagan, “had piles of bones everywhere.” About five miles south of the site of Puerto Real, where mountains rise from the grasslands of Plaine-du-Nord, a cow grazes in front of Sans Souci Palace, built in 1813 and awarded UNESCO World Heritage status in 1982. The digs turned up something else: animal bones, and lots of them.

Four hundred years later, archaeological excavations at the site unearthed pieces of its illicit but cosmopolitan past, including Venetian glassware, Ming porcelain, and rusted rapier hilts. They relocated residents to a settlement easier to control and razed Puerto Real. “The government of Spain tried to get them to stop but they just wouldn’t,” Deagan adds. So, Deagan says, its people “very happily traded” with anyone who turned up.

The city, despite its importance to Spain, was on the opposite end of the island from the capital of Santo Domingo, and far from more heavily trafficked trade routes. Deagan, a leading researcher in the archaeology of the region during the Spanish colonial period, ran excavations at Puerto Real. “At its peak, the industry was mostly based on contraband: illegal trade off the north coast with the Portuguese, French, and English corsairs and pirates,” says Kathleen Deagan, an archaeologist and research curator at the University of Florida’s Florida Museum of Natural History. During this period, Puerto Real emerged as an important town in the Caribbean, supplying beef and particularly leather throughout the region and to Spain. For the next seven decades, many Taíno were forced to work there as servants and laborers under the Spanish colonial system of encomienda, a form of slavery. The story that eventually comes ashore at Assateague begins in 1503, when Spain established Puerto Real as part of their brutal campaign of conquest of the indigenous Taíno people. Saddle up, because this is a wild ride that connects a case of mistaken identity with scientific discovery, stirs long-simmering political and legal battles, and, most surprisingly, adds another layer of intrigue to the centuries-old mystery of the famed feral horses of the barrier island of Assateague, more than 1,300 miles to the north. About the size of a bottle cap, the tooth fragment has opened an entirely new and unexpected chapter in the story of Puerto Real. Extensive excavations in the following decades revealed it was one of the largest Spanish sites in the Caribbean.Īmong the hundreds of thousands of artifacts and bones unearthed at the 16-acre site was a partial tooth, thought to be from one of the town’s many cows. What remained of its grand stone church, plaza, and scores of homes fell into ruin, rediscovered only in 1975 by an amateur archaeologist. On its northern edge, close to where the plain meets the surf, a small farm sits atop what was once Puerto Real.įor three-quarters of the 16th century, Puerto Real was a bustling cattle town with a dark story: Built on conquest, operated through exploitation and lawlessness, it was ultimately destroyed by the very government that had founded it. Today, this area of Haiti is known as the Plaine-du-Nord, but it is dotted with archaeological sites that chronicle millennia of indigenous Taíno settlements and, more recently, Spanish and French colonization. On the north coast of the island of Hispaniola, between rugged mountains and the Caribbean Sea, there is a wide stretch of grassland.

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