Small islands join a Caribbean wide prestige economy

By the Late Ceramic Age the communities of the Lesser Antilles were part of something larger than their own islands. Prestige goods moved along the chain, religious objects and their meanings moved with them, and people moved as well. Keegan and Hofman describe the process as integration into the sociopolitical and ideological spheres of the Greater Antillean polities: local art, ritual and rank all show the influence, and local societies were reorganised around it. What these communities did not do is dissolve. Each island kept working its own materials and its own version of the shared repertoire while participating in a wider Taíno world. The Caribbean that Columbus sailed into was already an interconnected region with its own centres, its own long distance exchange and its own prestige economy. The sea between the islands had been a road for centuries before any European used it as one.

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.

On 5 December 1492 Columbus brought his ships to the north coast of the island and named it La Isla Espanola, the Spanish island. Philippe Girard begins his history of Haiti at this point. What the Spanish found was a worked landscape. The island supported a large population living in villages under chiefs, growing cassava, sweet potato and maize in raised mounds, fishing the reefs, playing a ball game on prepared courts, and moving between islands in large canoes. Within fifty years almost all of it was gone. The naming is the part to notice. On the first day of contact the island acquired a Spanish identity in Spanish records, and the words its inhabitants used for it went into the archive as curiosities. Everything the Spanish did afterward followed from the assumption buried in that name. The country that eventually threw them and their French successors out chose to call itself Ayiti, a word taken from the people who were there first.

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.