Punta Candelero settles the Huecoid as a culture of its own

Before the excavation of Punta Candelero in eastern Puerto Rico, some researchers held that the Huecoid was a variant inside the wider Saladoid tradition, a regional specialisation rather than a separate people. Punta Candelero produced Huecoid material on its own, with no Hacienda Grande pottery associated with it. That isolation is the evidence which counted. While two styles always occur together, either explanation stays available; once one occurs without the other, the case for a distinct tradition becomes hard to refuse. The site established the Huecoid as a cultural horizon of its own in the Caribbean, which means the early Ceramic Age islands held at least two distinct populations arriving and settling alongside each other. Keegan and Hofman treat the finding as a turning point in the debate. The first pottery-making societies of the Antilles were plural from the start, and treating pre-Columbian island people as one undifferentiated group has been unsupportable for decades.

Latin speakers had a single word family for substances that acted in ways nobody could watch. Uenenum covered a potent herb, a magical influence and a poison, and out of it came a verb meaning to bewitch or to infect, a noun for the act itself, and uenefucus, a word for the person who did such things, used of men and of women. In the late republic the Roman state grew worried enough about those people to pass a law in 81 BCE against causing sudden or unexpected death by concealed means, whether the means were chemical or magical. The law treated the two as one offence. Sixteen centuries later, courts in Martinique and Suriname were still hearing cases in which nobody could say whether the accused had used a plant, a powder or a spell, and the statutes they used descended from this one. The vocabulary carried the ambiguity across two thousand years.