Macroblades at Fort Liberte mark two thousand years of coastal life

From about 2000 BCE to about 145 CE, sites belonging to the Courian Casimiroid subseries were occupied across Hispaniola, and archaeologists have identified them on the northern and the southern coast of present-day Haiti, at Fort Liberte and on Ile a Vache among other places. The long stone blade identifies them. Macroblade production, inherited from the older Lithic Age traditions of the island, carried on here for twenty centuries, and alongside it the tool kit widened to take in a greater range of ground stone. This is the framework archaeologists use to track pre-ceramic society in the Greater Antilles, and it covers a stretch of time four times longer than everything that has happened on the island since 1492. People were living at Fort Liberte, working stone and eating off that coast, for two thousand years before anyone in Europe knew the island was there.

African potters commonly fire their work in pits dug into the ground. Across the woodland savanna that runs from West Africa to the eastern edge of the Central African Republic, the ground is lateritic and heavy with iron oxide. The archaeologist Merrick Posnansky proposed that firing at high temperature in such pits would have produced small pieces of iron out of the soil itself, repeatedly, until somebody noticed. That is a plausible route to the discovery, and it puts the origin of the technology inside a craft that women had run for thousands of years. What happened next is a familiar sequence. Men took up smelting, built the rituals and symbols that assigned the work to them, and made the arrangement look ancient and proper. Women kept essential roles regardless, mining the ore, and in southern Africa and probably elsewhere shaping the ceramic tuyeres that carried air into the furnaces and the crucibles used for copper. The foundation was women's. The credit went elsewhere.

The El Convento site on the northern coast of Puerto Rico has produced the earliest radiocarbon assay for the Huecoid, one of the two ceramic traditions present at the opening of the Ceramic Age in the region. The date is a problem for the accepted model, which has these groups moving slowly from east to west along the island's north coast. At Maisabel the sequence points the same way. Huecoid ceramics were found in a sealed layer directly beneath deposits of the Hacienda Grande style, which is Saladoid. Sealed stratification is the strongest evidence archaeology offers, because a layer under an undisturbed layer is older and no argument changes that. Together the two sites suggest the Huecoid were established in parts of Puerto Rico earlier than at eastern sites such as La Hueca, where the tradition was first defined. Migration maps for the first pottery-making societies of the Caribbean are being redrawn around dates like these.

Around 1500 BCE a distinct ceramic tradition, which archaeologists call the Barrancoid series, developed in the middle and lower stretches of the Orinoco valley in what is now Venezuela. Over time its makers moved downriver toward the coast. The people already holding that ground, the communities Rouse files under the Saladero heading, were pushed out of their positions along the river, and out of that disturbance came the subseries he named Cedrosan Saladoid. This is upstream bookkeeping that matters a great deal for Haiti. The Cedrosan Saladoid are the people who a thousand years later carried farming, pottery and village life out of South America and into the Antilles, island by island, until they reached Hispaniola. The population Columbus met in 1492 descended from them. So the chain that ends in the Taino villages of the north coast begins with a pottery style shifting position on a South American river three thousand years earlier.