Swept floors, refuse mounds and graves left open at El Flaco

At El Flaco in the northwestern Dominican Republic, people levelled the ground for their houses and kept the living areas swept, so thoroughly that the floors are nearly empty of artefacts. Everything went onto earthen mounds around the edges of the settlement, and those mounds are dense with material: Chicoid and Meillacoid pottery together, beads of shell, bone and stone. The mixture of the two ceramic traditions in one place points to a community either drawing on both or living beside people who used the other. Some of the burials suggest a two stage funeral, with the grave left open until the body had dried before the final interment. A settlement that sweeps its floors, keeps its refuse in designated mounds and buries its dead in stages is a settlement running on rules everybody knows. El Flaco supplies the domestic detail that survey archaeology rarely reaches, and the detail describes an ordered daily life.

Gomes Eannes de Azurara wrote a chronicle of the Portuguese voyages down the West African coast. In it he reports that in 1441 sailors, one of them probably Antam Goncalves, carried the first Africans and a quantity of gold dust back to Portugal. Getting there had meant working past Cape Bojador, whose reefs and shoals had turned earlier ships back. Tiffany Lethabo King uses that date to slow down a habit of scholarship. Studies of colonialism reach almost automatically for 1492 and the Caribbean as the moment conquest begins. Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers both put the beginning earlier and elsewhere, on the shore of Guinea, where the category of Blackness was being made before there was an American colony to apply it in. Haiti sits at the far end of a line that starts on a stretch of Senegalese coast fifty years before Columbus sailed.

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.

Italian and Iberian merchants carried sugarcane out to the Atlantic islands during the fifteenth century, planting it on Madeira and in the Canaries. Sugar was not a new business for them. They had been growing and refining it around the Mediterranean for generations, using bound labour on estates in places like Cyprus and Sicily. What the islands changed was the setting. Here was land nobody in Europe held a prior claim on, a climate that suited the cane, and a workforce that could be shipped in from elsewhere. That is the plantation as it would later stand in the Caribbean, complete except for scale. I keep this on a Haitian timeline because of how often Saint-Domingue gets described as something new, an invention of the eighteenth century and a French one. It was a model that had been running for three hundred years by then. What the French did was move it west and make it enormous.