Wood survives at Los Buchillones and four centuries survive with it

Almost nothing organic lasts in Caribbean ground. Los Buchillones on the Cuban coast is the exception, a settlement built partly over water where posts, house frames and carved objects were held in the sediment and recovered by digging on land and by diving offshore. Radiocarbon dates put people there across four centuries, running from well before Columbus into the early years of Spanish rule, which makes it one of the few places where a single community can be followed across that break. What came out of it does not sit tidily inside the ceramic categories archaeologists use to sort the region, and the site is cited as evidence that indigenous life in the central Antilles was more various than those categories allow. The point is worth carrying forward. Wherever preservation happens to be good, the picture gets more complicated. The neatness of the standard account is mostly a property of what the soil destroys.

Bartolome de las Casas had spent years on Hispaniola teaching Christianity and had watched the island's original population die under Spanish rule. In 1517 he obtained a royal edict authorising the importation of four thousand Africans a year from the west coast of Africa. The monopoly of that traffic went to a Flemish nobleman who served as chamberlain to Charles V, and he sold it on to a commercial house in Genoa for twenty three thousand ducats. Portuguese traders had landed some Africans on the island as early as 1505, and others arrived at odd times afterwards, but no recognised trade of the kind existed across the Atlantic before this edict. Years passed after the warrant was issued before the traffic settled into a regular system. The man remembered as the friend of the Indians opened the transatlantic slave trade, and the licence was treated from the start as a commodity to be resold at a profit.

Laurent Dubois opens his history of the Haitian Revolution with the arrival of Columbus on the northern shore of the island on 5 December 1492 and with the name he gave it, La Isla Espanola. Europeans had touched other islands in the preceding weeks and sailed on. This time they stayed, and no year since has passed without a European or a European derived state claiming authority over some part of this ground. The island now carries two countries with different languages, different histories and a shared border running some three hundred and eighty kilometres. Haiti holds the western third and speaks Kreyol and French. The Dominican Republic holds the east and speaks Spanish. Both date from what happened after this landing, and the line between them was drawn later by European powers dividing the island between Spain and France. One afternoon on a beach in December is the common ancestor of two national histories that spend much of their time insisting they are unrelated.

When the Compagnie Francaise des Iles d'Amerique was set up in 1635 to carry on the traffic in enslaved Africans, Louis XIII laid down that everyone the company took had to be baptised and instructed in the Catholic faith. Conversion was the stated purpose of the commerce, and one of the earliest missionaries in the French islands, Father Jean-Baptiste Dutertre, wrote plainly that saving the souls of black people was the reason the business existed. In practice the rule produced an effect nobody in Paris had planned. Enslaved people treated baptism as a source of power rather than a change of allegiance, and presented themselves for it three, four, five and six times over. Planters grew suspicious of the priests, whom they thought capable of preaching that black and white were equal before God, and did what they could to keep religious instruction away from the work gangs.