Saladoid villages were egalitarian and still organised big labour

Archaeologists have generally described Saladoid communities as egalitarian, organised in small autonomous villages where leadership was temporary or rested on personal standing rather than inherited rank. The material culture makes that description harder than it sounds. These were people producing elaborate pottery and carved ornament, running exchange networks across hundreds of kilometres of open sea, and clearing forest for agriculture on a scale that needs many hands working at once. Peter Siegel has examined how such groups managed communal labour, the land clearance and the building of large shared structures, without the coercive authority that usually gets the credit for organised work. The question travels well beyond the Caribbean. It asks whether hierarchy is required in order to build things, and the answer these villages return is that it is not. Understanding how they coordinated is also the only way to explain how scattered communities colonised and held together a maritime region two thousand kilometres long.

By around the third century CE the Malagasy speaking community on the East African coast had lived among Bantu speaking neighbours long enough to have married into them. Some of them then sailed south, crossed the Mozambique Channel, and settled Madagascar. What they carried was a working farm system assembled out of two hemispheres: African livestock and African grain beside rice, bananas and chickens from Island South Asia, together with the practices that belonged to each. Madagascar has been that combination ever since. Its people speak an Austronesian language whose nearest relatives are in Borneo. They raise cattle bred in Africa and poultry domesticated in Southeast Asia. They grow African sorghum in the same country as Asian rice. Their ancestry is Bantu and Austronesian together. The island is the clearest surviving record of how far the ancient Indian Ocean trade reached and what it did on arrival, which was to move people, crops, animals and languages until two ends of the world were permanently joined in one place.

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.

Around the middle of the fifth century CE, people speaking Arawakan languages arrived on Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire, the islands lying off the coast of Venezuela, and brought pottery making with them. Their arrival marks the start of the Ceramic age on those islands. Somebody was already there. The earlier inhabitants belonged to the Archaic age, made a simpler set of tools, and are physically distinguishable in the skeletal record by the shape of the skull. They were displaced. Rouse records the sequence in the flat language of archaeology, and the flatness is worth noticing, because the displacement of one population by another is a thing that happens to people. These three islands sit where the South American mainland meets the Caribbean, which makes them a gauge for movements that later reached the whole chain of the Antilles. What happened here in the fifth century had happened elsewhere before and would happen again, long before any European ship arrived to start the count.