The eastern tip of Hispaniola was farmed and fished at the same time

At Punta Cana on the eastern end of Hispaniola, excavation has reached early Meillacoid occupation, a phase belonging to the shift toward larger agricultural communities. M. Veloz Maggiolo, E. Ortega and F. Luna Calderon read the deposits as the record of people working two food systems at once. They took what the reef and the shallows gave them, and they planted root crops in the ground behind, and the settlement was placed where both lay within reach. Pottery styles and stone tools from the site tie it to changes running through the Greater Antilles in the same period. The Dominican Republic and Haiti share one island and one archaeological sequence, whatever the border does to the way each country gets written about. Sites at the far eastern end of Hispaniola belong to the same story as the sites on the northern plain, and treating them separately is a habit of the last two centuries.

Alvise da Cadamosto, a Venetian working for the Portuguese, sailed to Senegambia in 1455 and opened his first negotiation with Budomel, a Jalof lord who promised captives in exchange for horses. To show good faith Budomel handed over a girl of about twelve. Cadamosto wrote that she was given for the service of his chamber, that he accepted her, and that he sent her to the ship. He recorded no objection to any part of the transaction and said nothing further about her. What she understood of it, and what the women and girls left behind under Budomel understood, went unwritten, though the terms would have been plain enough to all of them. Cadamosto came back to the Gambia river in 1456. His narrative was printed in Italian in 1507 and translated into Latin, German and French within eight years, which made it one of the first accounts through which European readers learned that people on that coast could be bought.

Columbus was born in Genoa in late October 1451, and he spent years selling a bad calculation to anyone who would listen. His estimate of the earth's circumference was wrong and the Portuguese court knew it was wrong, which is why they turned him down. Spain funded him anyway because the upside on a shortcut to Asia was worth the risk on the math. He never reached Asia and he never accepted that he had not. I keep him on this timeline as a person rather than as an event because the personhood is the point. This was not an inevitable force of history. It was a specific man with a specific error and a specific set of investors, and the four hundred years that followed on this island were the compound interest on that transaction.

Anacaona was born in 1464 at Yaguana, the place we now call Léogâne. Her name in Taíno means Golden Flower. She was a cacique, meaning a head of state, and she was also a composer of areítos, the sung poems that carried Taíno history. She ruled Xaragua, negotiated with the Spanish, hosted them, and was hanged by Governor Nicolás de Ovando in 1504 after a massacre of her nobles at a banquet. Now follow the chain, because this is where the timeline stops being a list and starts being an argument. With Taíno labor destroyed and Taíno leadership executed, the colonial administration needed a replacement workforce. The importation of enslaved Africans to Hispaniola accelerates directly out of that gap. Anacaona's death is not only the end of one story. It is the procurement decision that begins another.