Villages in the northern Lesser Antilles get smaller and hide

Through the Late Ceramic Age the settlements of the northern Lesser Antilles get fewer and smaller, and Puerto Rico shows the same trend at the same time. Communities also began choosing sites that were remote or naturally protected, tucked away from the obvious landing places. Something was pressing on these islands. The material culture of the period shows heavy interaction with the Greater Antilles, the kind involving prestige goods and religious objects rather than everyday trade, and the smaller islands were being drawn into political and ideological systems centred elsewhere. Local trajectories that had run independently for centuries were interrupted. Where a community puts its houses is the most practical statement it can make about whom it expects to see coming. Fewer villages, in harder places to reach, sited for shelter and for warning, describe a region under pressure from outside itself, several centuries before any European sail appeared on that horizon.

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.