A word that should mean ancient, but instead, in the mouth of empire, it means primitive. A word used to mark a time before—before pottery, before kings, before written records. As if history did not exist before ink touched parchment, before stone rose into monuments. But there was always history. It was carved into bones, left in the shells of conch that lined the shores of the Caribbean.
Before Columbus wrote his first lie, the people of these islands lived by the tide, by the pull of the moon, by the certainty that the sea always provides. Before the Europeans named them Casimiroids or Ortoiroids, before they labeled them archaic, these people knew how to make fire, how to carve tools from stone, how to live on what the land and water gave. Their pottery may not have been buried deep enough to be found by modern hands, but that does not mean they were without beauty, without culture, without craft.
To call them archaic is to suggest that they were waiting for civilization to find them, that they were a prelude rather than a people. But history was never just a straight line moving forward—it was a tide, it was a current, it was a spiral. And the first inhabitants of these islands, the ones who fished, who shaped stones, who walked this land long before the colonizer’s maps, were not before history. They were history.
