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reconstruct the lives of the merchants and plantation owners that once lived here. Pulitzer prize winning historian, Barbara Tuchman, made the island the focus of her book The First Salute, while Ronald Hurst wrote The Golden Rock, an essential guide to the history of the island during the American Revolution.
Drs. Norman Barka from The College of William and Mary in Virginia and Edward Dethlefsen of Harvard University came to the island in 1979 to explore the potential of archaeological excavations. They discovered that archaeological resources were incredible. Over the next twenty-years Barka and his students produced a substantial body of archaeological work related to many aspects of the island's colonial history.
Europeans were not the first people to inhabit St. Eustatius. Prior to the Dutch arrival in the 17th Century, Native Americans of the Saladoid culture thrived on St. Eustatius between 2150 B.P. (300 B.C..) and 1150 B.P.(800 A.D.). The Dutch archaeologist J.P.B. Josselin de Jong investigated Saladoid sites on St. Eustatius during the 1920s. Further work was conducted during the 1980s by Aad Versteeg of Leiden University (Follow this link to his website).
Altogether there are over 200 archaeological sites on this small island. Very few land masses in the world have this concentration of archaeological and historical material.
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