Island communities kept lifelines open to the mainland they came from

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.

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.

Around 1000 BCE Ortoiroid communities completed a long movement up the Lesser Antilles and reached Puerto Rico. Their arrival brought them within reach of a different world. Hispaniola, immediately west across the Mona Passage, was held by Casimiroid peoples who had entered the islands from another direction entirely and had been there for thousands of years. The two now shared a frontier. Rouse reads the archaeology of the following centuries as a flow of technique running northwest to southeast, from the Casimiroid side into the Ortoiroid one, carrying ways of flaking and grinding stone. That direction is the interesting part. The newcomers coming up the chain were the ones learning. Whatever the older population of Hispaniola had worked out about local stone over several millennia of residence was worth adopting, and it moved across the passage into Puerto Rico. The Mona Passage has been a channel of exchange for three thousand years, and Haiti sits on the western side of it.