A ring of middens around a plaza can be a sequence in disguise

Caribbean village sites often show refuse mounds set in a ring around an open central plaza, and the arrangement has usually been read as a plan, with every mound in use at once by a community that laid its settlement out that way on purpose. William Keegan observed that the ring can also be the residue of movement. Houses shift, one mound is abandoned, another begins, and after two centuries the debris forms a circle that nobody ever inhabited at a single moment. The distinction decides what an excavation is measuring, one generation's behaviour or a process running for hundreds of years. Keegan's term for the frame of mind required is timespacescapes, which asks the archaeologist to hold place and duration together instead of reading a plan off a surface. Caribbean sites were lived in, left, and returned to. The pattern that survives is a record of that traffic.

The earthquake hit at 4:53 in the afternoon on 12 January 2010, with its epicentre at Leogane, sixteen miles west of Port-au-Prince. As many as three hundred thousand people died, among them Archbishop Joseph Serge Miot and Hedi Annabi, who ran the United Nations mission. More than a million were left without homes. At least two hundred and fifty thousand houses came down, along with thirty thousand shops, offices and public buildings, among them the National Palace and the cathedral, thirteen hundred schools and some fifty hospitals. Over four thousand prisoners walked out of the main penitentiary. Foreign governments pledged ten billion dollars. The Dominican Republic, whose relationship with Haiti is a two hundred year argument, was the first country to send help. The American military ran Operation Unified Response. A telethon fronted by George Clooney and Wyclef Jean brought in fifty-seven million dollars. Port-au-Prince stopped working as a city, and the buildings housing the Haitian state and the foreign mission supervising it fell in the same minute.

Famine became the standing image of modern Africa, and by the 1970s many states were importing the staples they had once grown. Sub-Saharan Africa combined the fastest population growth outside the West with the slowest growth in food production. Three explanations get offered. Climate is one, since Sahel rainfall stayed low through the 1970s and 1980s. Pressure on fragile land is another. The third is political, and it does most of the work, because in a great many famines the volume of food does not fall at all. What changes is price, distribution and who holds a claim on a share. War causes famine and famine feeds war. Zimbabwe kept grain reserves through the 1980s and had food security because of them; structural adjustment called reserves a distortion of the market, the government sold them for foreign exchange, and when the rains failed in the 1990s the silos were empty. Mugabe then withheld relief from districts that voted against him.

Michel-Rolph Trouillot died in Chicago in July 2012. He was born in Port-au-Prince into a family of historians, left Haiti under the Duvalier dictatorship, and spent his career in American universities, the last of them the University of Chicago. His first book, written in Haitian Creole in 1977, retold the revolution for readers who spoke the language the revolution was fought in. Haiti: State Against Nation, published in 1990, described a state sitting on top of a peasantry it taxed and did not serve. Silencing the Past, published in 1995, is the work that travelled furthest. It argued that power enters the record long before any historian arrives, at the moment a fact is made, filed, retrieved and finally told as a story, and that the revolution in Saint-Domingue was unthinkable to the Europeans who had to write it down. Scholars in fields with no interest in Haiti now use his terms to ask who kept the documents and what was never written at all.