A bead workshop on Grand Turk eats nothing but fish heads

The rubbish at Governors Beach on Grand Turk is mostly fish heads. The species is grunt, caught in numbers that point to basket traps, and the bodies are missing. Fire cracked rock at the site indicates the bodies were smoked on a barbacoa, a wooden rack over a slow fire, and then carried away. The main business here was making beads, and beadworkers have to eat. Feeding a work party on fish heads while the preserved fillets go back to the larger settlements of Hispaniola is a provisioning decision, and it distinguishes this place from Coralie nearby, where the diet looks quite different. The deposits describe an outpost: a specialised production site on a small island, supplied and staffed from a larger island to the south, with its output and even its food shipped back to the centre. The Turks and Caicos were a frontier for the Greater Antilles, worked for what they yielded.

Speakers of Old French inherited a noun, puison, from the Latin word for a drink, and it kept both the senses Latin had carried. A puison could be a medicine and it could kill. Around 1130 they built something new out of it, the verb empoisonner, which meant to kill by poison and carried no other sense. By the end of the thirteenth century they had added a noun for the person who did it. Anglo Norman speakers took the verb across the channel in the fourteenth century, shortened it, and made their own word for the doer. The direction of the change is the evidence. Nobody needed a verb meaning to give medicine. People needed a word for a particular fear, and once the word for the person existed, the person existed as a type. The French colonists who reached the Caribbean four centuries later brought this vocabulary with them and applied it to the enslaved.

Al-Idrisi finished his world map in 1154 with south at the top, the Arabian peninsula in the middle, the Red Sea on one side and the Persian Gulf on the other, and Africa above them. Nothing about the arrangement is careless. Before the magnetic compass was taken up in European navigation, the two fixed points a traveller used were where the sun rises and where it sets. The word orientation carries that history, since to orient yourself was to face the sunrise. East and west became cardinal directions once the compass was in general use, and the same shift put north at the top of the page and south at the bottom. Mapmakers outside Europe did not all follow. Al-Idrisi's map is a reminder that the familiar picture of the globe, with Europe near the top and Africa hanging below it, is a convention with a date attached to it.

The Fourth Crusade took Constantinople in 1204, and merchants from Genoa and Venice used the opening to set up ports on the northern shore of the Black Sea where they could buy people. They kept at it for two and a half centuries. The captives were Armenians, Circassians, Tatars and Bulgarians, and European clerks lumped them together under the loose heading of Slavs, which is where the word slave entered the languages of western Europe. Where those people went matters as much as who they were. A good number were put to work growing and milling sugar on Cyprus and Sicily, an operation that needed gangs of labour under supervision through a fixed season. The plantation with a bound workforce on it was therefore a working European business two centuries before anyone crossed the Atlantic. When it was carried to Madeira, then to Hispaniola, then to Saint-Domingue, nothing about it had to be invented. It had to be enlarged, and the supply had to be found somewhere else.