Clam shells prove Grand Turk was worked only in the dry season

Tiger lucine is a clam whose shell grows in increments that record the season of its death, so a midden full of them will say when in the year the people eating them were present. At Governors Beach on Grand Turk the answer was unambiguous: dry season only. Nobody stayed through the wet months. The archaeological deposits are shallow, which fits a place used briefly and repeatedly instead of lived in. Putting the two facts together gives a picture of people from Hispaniola crossing to the Turks and Caicos in the part of the year when the farming at home did not need them, working the island for what it produced, and going back again. That is scheduling. It requires knowing the calendar of two places at once and moving a work party across open water to fit them together. The small outer islands sat inside the working year of the Greater Antilles, rostered like any other field.

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.