Oct. 9, 2006 — Christopher Columbus and his men traded cheap brass shoelace tags for gold when they first arrived in Cuba, according to new research.
While Columbus and his crew knew they were getting the better end of the deal, the indigenous Caribbean people, called the Taino, valued the small brass tags more than gold, which was then relatively abundant in Cuba.
"Brass was new, exotic and required liaising with the Europeans, and on top of that it had a special smell and iridescence," lead researcher Marcos Martinón-Torres told Discovery News. "All of these factors probably contributed to its appeal."
The research will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science.
Martinón-Torres, a lecturer at the University College London Institute of Archaeology, explained that the Taino called brass "turey," meaning "heaven," because they thought sniffing brass allowed them to smell heaven. Written sources also suggest brass was thought to imbue wearers with supernatural powers.
The tags, which the Europeans used to prevent shoe and clothing laces from fraying, weren’t even very useful in this way for the native Cubans, who instead chose to make jewelry out of them, sometimes with the shoelace still attached.
The UCL archaeologists, in collaboration with the Ministry of Science and Technology in Cuba, found many examples of such jewelry at burial sites in northeast Cuba. The sites date to the late 15th and early 16th centuries, in the decades just following the arrival of Columbus’s 1492 Spanish fleet.
Gold was notably missing in the graves, which had not been looted.
"Columbus himself records in his diaries the trade of gold for shoelace tags," said Martinón-Torres. "Much of the gold plundered from Latin America is still circulating around Europe nowadays (remelted into new objects), as recent provenance studies have shown."
