Museo de Sitio Chorro de Maíta is the product of one of the numerous archaeological sites in Banes. Ninety-six sites have been officially registered in the Holguin municipality of Banes, an area declared the archaeological capital of Cuba.

This museum is built on the largest aboriginal burial site found in Cuba which is also the oldest cemetery in all the Americas.

The site of the excavated cemetery was previously home to a farm with a powerful water source owned by a woman named Maíta. This is where the museum's name comes from.

The cemetery located in Chorro de Maíta is actually a settlement belonging to an indigenous population supposed to have lived in the 13th century and to have disappeared from history in the first half of the 16th century with the Spanish conquest of the island. The remains indicate that the area was inhabited by the Taíno. The Taíno are the Indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles and surrounding islands, such as the Bahamas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the northern Lesser Antilles. They were skilled in agriculture, hunting, and pottery. By polishing stone and carving wood, the Taíno were able to create many useful hand tools and hunting equipment.

Radiocarbon studies on samples taken from non-funerary areas confirm these dates. It is almost certain that the disappearance of the settlement was a consequence of the encomienda system. The encomienda was a Spanish labour system that rewarded conquerors with the labor of conquered non-Christian peoples. In theory, the conquerors provided the laborers with benefits, including military protection and education. In practice, the conquered were subject to conditions that closely resembled instances of forced labor and slavery.

It has been determined that burials in cemeteries increased after contact with the Spanish, and that, as a result of the imposition of Christianity, burial methods began to differ by the mid-16th century.

The Discovery of the Cemetery

The first to point out the existence of the cemetery was José A. García Castañeda, an amateur archaeologist living in Holguin, in 1927. In fact, the burial density in this region has been known since the beginning of the 20th century. Locals building houses and burying their dead in the area occasionally encountered human remains and various objects thought to have been used by these humans.

The site was introduced to the archaeological world by American Irving Rouse, who visited the site in 1941 and published a detailed report. Later, the significance of the site was further appreciated with excavations conducted in the period from 1986 to 1988 and directed by José Manuel Guarch Delmonte, then head of the Archaeology section of the Institute of Social Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of Cuba in Holguín. In this way this cemetery was discovered in September 1986.

Between 2005 and 2012, an area of approximately 35 thousand square meters was excavated and 108 additional graves were found. In some of these graves ornaments made of metal (gold and copper), coral, resin, stone and other materials were found, belonging to the deceased. More than 16,000 excavated pieces were studied, including 600 fragments of European pottery, a variety of objects, including funerary tributes, household items from fishing, hunting, and food preparation.

The Site Museum of Chorro de Maíta was inaugurated by the then Minister of Culture, Armando Hart Dávalos in 1990 as the product of an archaeological excavation program, scientifically supervised by the Department of Middle East Archaeology of the province of Holguín.

It was declared National Monument in 1991.

Today, the area surrounded by the fence is the estimated area of the cemetery. Studies in this field are ongoing in collaboration with foreign universities to take advantage of the developing technologies.

The Cemetery

The indigenous people living in Chorro de Maíta are thought to have occasionally come into contact with other cultures. While the vast majority of the human skeletons belong to the Taíno, new research indicated that the cemetery has unexpected amount of ethnic diversity. For example, one skeleton belonged to a person from West Africa, two were mestizos (one person is a mixture of Spanish and native, one is a mixture of native and African), and one was Mesoamerican aboriginal woman from Yucatán. The mestizos may be be the first Cuban Creoles. Mestizo is a term primarily used to denote people of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry in the former Spanish Empire. Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area extending from the southern part of North America to the Pacific coast of Central America and thus encompasses the territories of Central and Southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Western Honduras, and the Greater Nicoya region of Nicaragua and Costa Rica.

There is abundant evidence of contact between the Indigenous people and the Spanish, as Spanish vases, ornaments, brass fragments, and bells were found in the burials.

It is informed that 23 people buried here were not from this region.

Christian-style burials have also been found, with arms crossed over the chest, legs straight out and wearing Mediterranean linen clothing.

The excellent preservation of many skeletons, especially the skulls, is remarkable. The high amount of calcium carbonate in the soil is thought to have provided this preservation.