Stone ball courts mark the arrival of the chiefdoms

By about 1200 the societies of the Greater Antilles were building stone lined ball courts, and the courts are how archaeologists mark the arrival of what they call the Formative age. A ball court is a permanent public work. It has to be sited, cleared, lined with worked stone and then maintained, and it exists only where somebody can command labour for a project that grows no food. What happened in these courts was the political and religious life of a chiefdom: games between communities, ceremonies, the settling of rank and obligation in front of an audience. The chiefdoms the Spanish met on Hispaniola three centuries later, with paramount caciques, tribute and inherited standing, were the mature form of this arrangement. Those institutions had been under construction here for three hundred years before any European described them, and the ball courts are what remains of the places where people gathered to watch them work.

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.

By about 1200 the Chicoid culture on Hispaniola had matured into what we call Taíno. Caciques ruled defined territories. Villages had plazas and bateyes, the ball courts where a game that was also a legal and religious proceeding got played. Cassava agriculture on conucos fed dense settlement. Zemís carried the cosmology. The island was not empty and it was not simple, and it had been running like this for roughly three hundred years before a single European saw it. Here is the part that survives into everything after. Ayiti is a Taíno word. Bohio and Quisqueya are Taíno words. Kanzo, barbecue, hammock, hurricane, canoe, tobacco, maize, all of it. When people say the Taíno were exterminated, they are describing what happened to the population and missing what happened to the vocabulary, the crops, and the maps.

Around 1200 the potters of Saba began decorating their vessels in the Chicoid manner, a style whose heartland lay in Hispaniola several hundred kilometres to the west. The same influence appears at the same time on St John, St Croix, St Martin and Anguilla. Five small islands, separated from each other and from Hispaniola by open water, took up a shared visual language. Pottery decoration is one of the ways a community states what it belongs to, and this change means the northern Lesser Antilles were participating in something centred elsewhere and were content to show it. Archaeologists use the pattern to define the Eastern Taíno sphere, a zone of sustained interaction rather than a political unit. The picture of small islands developing in isolation, each community working out its own answers alone, cannot survive this evidence. These places were in constant conversation, and the conversation moved along the same canoe routes that carried food, stone and people.