Carvings at springs and caves map a sacred geography

Carvings pecked into rock are scattered through the Lesser Antilles and Trinidad, and C. N. Dubelaar's survey shows they are not placed at random. They cluster at springs, at pools in rivers, and in caves. The motifs repeat as well: figures with their limbs bound close to the body, and stylised faces matching the cemí imagery known from the Greater Antilles. Water sources and cave mouths are the places where one world was understood to open into another, and marking them permanently in stone is a claim about where the boundary lies. The same claim, in the same visual language, appears across hundreds of kilometres of island chain. Beliefs travelled the archipelago as reliably as pottery and conch did, and communities separated by open sea agreed about which places were sacred and how to say so. These carvings are the oldest surviving public art in the Caribbean, and they were made to be found again.

The Portuguese kingdom had grown out of a long war against Muslim rule in Iberia and carried that war across the water. With barely a million people it could not break Islamic power in north Africa, so it went south instead, hoping to reach the gold that crossed the Sahara and to find the Christian priest king its stories placed somewhere in Asia or Africa. Enslaved people were an immediate return, and from the middle of the fifteenth century a steady stream of them was landed in Portugal from the West African coast. Roughly seventy papal bulls licensed the enterprise across that century. In 1482 the Portuguese reached the gold coast and built a fort at Elmina, their first tropical possession. A local chief asked them to go somewhere else. They asked him to accept baptism and save his soul. Neither side agreed. The next year Portugal settled the empty island of Sao Tome.

Hispaniola is the second largest island in the Caribbean and the ground on which several of the most consequential events in the hemisphere took place. Haiti holds the western third and the Dominican Republic the eastern two thirds. Columbus named it La Isla Espanola in 1492, the Spanish island, and the Latin form of the shortened version became the standard name in English. Together with Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico it makes up the Greater Antilles. The colonial names still cause confusion in print. Saint-Domingue was the French colony in the west and Santo Domingo the Spanish colony in the east, and writers applied both loosely to the whole island, blurring the distinction between two territories that were already becoming separate countries. The Taino had their own words for the place. Those words appear in a few early Spanish documents and then vanish. A name is a small thing to lose, and it is usually the first thing taken.

When Columbus arrived in 1492 the island was divided among five Taino chiefdoms, each under a leader called a cacique. Jaragua in the south and Marien in the north cover most of what is now Haiti. Higuey, Magua and Maguana occupied the eastern two thirds, roughly the territory of the Dominican Republic. These were more than villages. Each chiefdom held many settlements, collected tribute, organised labour for planting and building, and conducted relations with its neighbours. Succession was matrilineal. When a cacique died, authority passed to the eldest child of his eldest sister, so a woman's line carried political legitimacy and women themselves could and did rule, as Anacaona of Jaragua did. Spanish administration had no place for any of this and set about replacing it within a decade. The island had a political geography before 1492, with borders, capitals and rules of inheritance. What arrived in December of that year was one system of power destroying another.