After exploring the sea wall and shore with our guide it is now time to turn inland. And the first major stop is the Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology. It is named after a former colonial administrator who collected many of the artifacts now housed in the museum. The museum itself is quite small, one room at the ground floor and one room at the top floor but it is housed an a typical colonial building that is great to see and the exhibits give you at least a cursory glimpse of the culture of Guyana.
We start with the ground floor and in our case, with a guide, many of the artifacts are narrated which helps significantly even though there are multiple informational signs for the exhibits. The reason it helps is that our guide presents a lot also from his perspective, what is still happening, what is in the past, what he did when he was young and so on. For example dugout canoes, in his naration are still widely used in the interior as they are easy to make and to abandon as needed.
There are quite a few exhibits showing what objects can be made from the trees and bushes of the jungle. It makes sense that the people living here were using everything they were finding around them given the bounty the many trees could provide them.
The corner that most excites us is the petroglyph corner. It has multiple stones with petroglyphs and we really enjoy to see if there are differences between the petroglyphs in one country versus another.
The interesting thing is that many of them, across countries, are similar. This makes sense as there are only that many ways you can represent a human or an animal. But the ones here are slightly different with waving people and boas, unfortunately all of them are reproductions and we are not sure how accurate there are.
There are also many shells and other archaeological finds from Guyana, which again makes sense as most human habitations would have been at the seashore or along rivers.
One of the interesting things we learn about are the shell mounds. There were quite a few of them and even know archaeologists are not sure why the indigenous tribes were building them. But they seem quite fun in the recreation that exists in the museum, sadly you cannot visit any actual ones as far as we know.
The upper floor room is similarly sized and has additional exhibits, more related to cassava preparation and native people adornments.
As expected many of the necklaces and other accoutrements are made of beads and natural materials like bird feathers. Which is a bit sad but it makes sense, we have seen something similar in Hawaii.
There are also exhibits with weapons used both for hunting and intra-tribal warfare as needed.
The major exhibit here and where we spend the majority of time with our time is the cassava exhibit. He explains all the different stages of cassava extraction and we learn that the juice is actually poisonous which we had no idea.
In fact cassava is used in different forms in various foods in Guyana from the pepperpot we ate the day before to some pita like bread. It is quite interesting to learn all of this, we had no idea how important cassava is for equatorial countries.
There are also many other crafts exhibits including one on how to make hammocks. Which are very important here, it is part of the culture to sleep at night in hammocks as we will learn in the next days.
And then there are a couple exhibits about pottery and water gourds, having water is quite important in this tropical climate. And then it is time to leave, unfortunately the museum does not have a gift shop so we have to buy souvenirs from someplace else it seems. Next on our route is the central downtown area near the main church, St. George’s Cathedral.
