Excavating around Fort Liberté Bay in northern Haiti in 1935, Rainey opened five shell heaps that held chipped flint scrapers, knives and stemmed blades but not a single potsherd. Since deposits elsewhere in the Antilles normally yield pottery and no worked flint, he reads these sites as the remains of a separate and earlier people, one preceding the pottery-making cultures found across the islands at the time of the conquest.

Six further middens in the same district did contain ceramics, and these he sorts into two ornamental styles, Carrier and Meillac, both belonging to the wider complex he calls the Shell Culture and associates with Arawak speakers. Stratigraphy in Puerto Rico had placed that complex above a still older Crab Culture; nothing of the sort turned up in north Haiti. Grinding stones, notched stone axes and fragments of red ocher accompanied the flint.