Saladoid villages lived off gardens and reefs at the same time

The move into the Early Ceramic Age in the Antilles involved fitting mainland farming to island conditions. The Saladoid colonists arrived with established agricultural technique and paired it with heavy use of the sea, taking fish, shellfish and reef species in quantity. The combination is what made permanent villages possible. Gardens carry a settlement through the year and the reef carries it through a bad harvest, and a community holding both can stay in one place for generations. Those villages kept their ties to each other through exchange, moving finished objects and raw materials between islands. The pottery of the period, in its Huecan and Cedrosan styles, is the visible record of those connections. Keegan and Hofman read the era as the first real pulse of regional integration in the Caribbean, the point at which separate islands began behaving like a single social world. Everything that happens in the archipelago afterwards happens inside a space that was already connected.

Textbooks teach a sequence for metals in which copper comes first and iron follows long after, because that is how it went in Europe and the Middle East. South of the Sahel the order runs the other way. Iron smelting was established across two thirds of Africa before copper was worked at all, and knowing how to hold a furnace at heat is what led people to recognise copper ores and smelt them. The clearest case is the belt of copper rich country running from central Zambia into the southern Congo. Bantu speakers of the Sabi group began working those ores no later than the fourth century CE, several centuries after iron reached them. Copper and copper goods then moved out along the Zambezi watershed and up the rivers into the Congo basin. From about the eighth century a further set of Bantu communities spread through the same region, their speech ancestral to the Luba dialects heard there now, and the older Sabi language fell out of use while the mines kept growing.

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.