A frontier across Puerto Rico worked as a trading counter for six centuries

For roughly six hundred years, from about 1000 to 400 BCE, a cultural boundary ran through Puerto Rico. On one side were Ortoiroid communities who had come up the island chain from South America. On the other, westward across the Mona Passage in Hispaniola, were Casimiroid peoples whose ancestry ran back toward Central America. Rouse treats the line as a place of contact. Unusual goods moved across it, among them crystals and the conical stone pestles that turn up in sites on both sides. A frontier of that kind is a working relationship rather than a wall, and the objects that crossed it were the rare and worked ones rather than daily tools. This is the deep background to Haitian history. Two separate migrations into the islands, arriving from different continental directions across several thousand years, met in the water between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico and did business. The island Columbus reached had been a meeting place for a very long time.

The spread of the early iron smelting sites carries two implications. The first concerns place. The pattern of the distribution makes it likely that the people who worked out the technology lived somewhere in the fifteen hundred kilometres of woodland savanna between central Nigeria and the far northwestern fringe of East Africa. The second concerns time. Sites were already scattered across that enormous stretch three thousand years ago, and a technology takes generations to travel that far, so the founding workshops should date centuries before 1000 BCE. Both expectations have since been tested. In the last two decades archaeologists have found earlier African ironworking than anything previously recorded, and the finds sit inside the predicted zone. Ôboui, in the western Central African Republic, is one of them. This is the pattern that keeps repeating in Ehret's field. A prediction is made from vocabulary and distribution, someone digs in the indicated place, and the dates come back older than the standard account allows.

Late in the Archaic Age the traffic grew heavier between the islands and the Isthmo-Colombian mainland of Central and South America. Goods moved, and so did people and ideas. Keegan and Hofman describe these routes as lifelines running back to the communities the islanders had come from, which is a precise way to put it. A small population scattered across islands needs contact to stay viable, socially and culturally and in the plainest biological sense, and the mainland connection supplied it. The archaeology of the period looks different from one island to the next, and the authors read that variation as people adjusting to the particular place they had landed in. What this era built was the framework the later ceramic age villages would use. The settled farming communities that eventually filled Hispaniola did not appear out of nowhere. They inherited routes, relationships and habits of movement that had been in service for centuries.

Horizon I on Martinique produced some of the earliest radiocarbon dates in the West Indies for the Cedrosan Saladoid, the pottery-making farming people who moved north into the islands from the South American mainland. Rouse treats the date as the opening of a long demographic change rather than a single landing. The islands were already occupied by Archaic-age bands, smaller groups who fished, gathered and hunted and who did not farm. Over the following centuries the farmers displaced them. Martinique sits in the middle of the Lesser Antilles, on the road running from the mouth of the Orinoco up the arc towards Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, and anything travelling that road passes it. I put a Martinique radiocarbon date on a Haitian timeline because the people the Spanish met on Hispaniola in 1492 came out of this movement. Their arrival is datable, gradual and about two thousand years long. Haiti has an indigenous beginning that predates every European in the story.