A wall 85 metres long in Cuba is built entirely out of rubbish

The Cuban site called Big Wall takes its name from the Gran Muro de San Lucas, a straight earthwork about 1.8 metres high running 85 metres across the ground. The material is what sets it apart. It was raised from midden, the shell, bone, ash and broken pottery a village discards, rather than from quarried soil or stone. Low round mounds sit at either end and probably carried buildings, houses or something more specialised. Most monumental ground in the Caribbean encloses a plaza. This one runs in a line, which marks a different idea about how to divide space and where a settlement stops. The choice of material carries its own argument. The refuse of daily living was gathered up and made into a permanent public structure, so the leavings of the household became the fabric of the thing everyone could see. The division between domestic and monumental was not one these builders observed.

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.

On 5 December 1492 Columbus came ashore on the island the Spanish would name Hispaniola and declared it the property of the Spanish crown. The act consisted of words spoken in a language nobody present understood, a banner, and a notarial record carried back to Europe. Several hundred thousand Taino were living on the island that afternoon. Nothing in the ceremony required their agreement, their presence, or any knowledge on their part that it had happened. The legal fiction outlived the man who performed it. Spain, and France after it, went on treating the western Atlantic as vacant ground that Europeans could assign to one another by treaty, and every later argument about who owned Saint-Domingue traced back to a document written on that premise. The people already there entered European law as an obstacle to be cleared. Haiti spent the next three hundred and twelve years arguing with a claim made in a single afternoon.

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.