A greenstone dog spirit and an agate ear spool were made in Jamaica

Two objects from Jamaica show how far the shared religious language of the Caribbean reached. One is an ear spool of agate, twelve millimetres across, grooved around the side and pierced through the centre, and the hole was most likely there to take coloured feathers. The other is a pendant of greenstone seven centimetres long, carved as a dog spirit, a figure that recurs across the islands. Olive shells found on the same ground, some finished and some broken part way through working, show that beads and pendants were being made on the spot rather than only brought in. The craft was local and the imagery was regional. Jamaica is often treated as a margin of the pre-Columbian Caribbean, a place things reached late. What is in the ground says otherwise. People living there were producing high status ornament themselves, in the styles and the spiritual vocabulary that ran through the whole Antillean world.

At the feast of Mary in August 1449 the Emperor Zara Ya'iqob gathered the leaders of the Ethiopian church at the monastery of Dabra Mitmaq in Shoa. Two Egyptian metropolitans came, along with the abbots of Dabra Hayk, Dabra Libanos, Dabra Bizan, Dabra Damo and many other houses. The question was the Sabbath. One monastic party, the House of Ewostatewos, kept the Jewish Saturday and had been refusing ordination from the metropolitan for decades; the rest of the kingdom ignored it. The emperor, who had spent twenty years shut up in the mountain prison at Amba-Gishan before taking the throne in 1434, had thought the matter through and written books about it. The council agreed that both days would be kept and that the Ewostathians would accept ordination again. Ethiopians have observed two Sabbaths ever since. The province that mattered politically lay in the north, near the Red Sea coast the emperor was determined to control.

Columbus sailed from Cuba on 5 December 1492 convinced that Cuba was part of a mainland. The next day he brought his ships into a harbour at the northwestern tip of the island now called Haiti, the place later known as Nicolas mole and then Mole Saint-Nicolas. Its entrance lies between two capes about three quarters of a mile apart. Inside, the water narrows, bends to the northeast, and ends in a basin cut off from the open sea by a low neck of land half a mile across. It is deep throughout, sheltered from every wind, and holds an anchor well. Columbus recorded how safe the place was and also how dry and poor the country around it looked. Both judgements held. For the next four centuries the harbour was the best on that coast and the land behind it stayed thin, and in the eighteen eighties foreign governments opened negotiations to acquire the port.

After weeks out of the Canaries the ships made land on 12 October 1492 at an island in the Bahamian archipelago. The people living there called it Guanahani. Columbus went ashore with a notary and a royal standard, performed the ceremony of possession in the name of Ferdinand and Isabella, and gave the island a new name, San Salvador. Nobody on the Taino side had any way of knowing what the ritual meant, and the document it produced was written in a language none of them read. Which island in the Bahamas this was remains argued over, since several candidates fit the sailing directions in the log. The naming matters more than the location. The first act of the encounter was the replacement of a local name with a Spanish one, backed by a legal formula devised in Europe to turn land already occupied by other people into crown property. That formula was applied to Hispaniola eight weeks later.