The housing plan moves six hours north to serve a garment factory

The shelter specialists sent to Haiti after the earthquake had designed something modest: small houses that families could extend later, built near Canaan about thirty minutes outside Port-au-Prince on land the government had taken by eminent domain. Cheryl Mills at the State Department wanted a new development in the north instead, around the Caracol industrial park, to provide the worker housing that had helped attract a Korean garment manufacturer to Haiti. The programme moved to a site six hours from the capital and from the people it was meant to shelter. In October 2012, shortly before the industrial park was inaugurated, Hillary Clinton toured the housing site and described homes that a family could afford, with piped water, flushing toilets, dependable power, and walls able to stand a hurricane or a quake. Harold Charles and the founder of Thor Construction stood with her. The programme ended in a cover-up worth twenty million dollars and a criminal case that stalled.

Two months after the ruling, in November 2013, President Danilo Medina announced by decree that a regularisation plan would be created, and the plan itself was established in December. In 2014 the Dominican Republic passed Naturalisation Law 169-14. It divided people into two groups. The first was the roughly fifty five thousand people born in the country whose citizenship had been annulled; the law restored their nationality, and five years later about half of them had actually recovered their documents. The second was people born in the country whose births had never been registered, because they were born outside a hospital or left one without papers. To become citizens they had first to declare themselves Haitian nationals, enter the register for foreigners and wait two years for a naturalisation procedure nobody had defined. Enrolment took repeated journeys and money for transport. Before the deadline, 8,755 applications were filed.

Unitransfer USA was created in 1999 to move money from Haitians in the United States to families and institutions in Haiti. By 2013 it ran 716 offices, 284 of them in Haiti and 432 in the United States, Canada, the Caribbean and Europe. Its chairman put the annual traffic at 275 thousand people in the diaspora sending more than two hundred million dollars home. Its headquarters is in Hollywood, Florida, and it is licensed to operate in eleven states. Before the earthquake of 2010 it claimed more than fifty offices and three hundred agents inside Haiti. It has since followed Haitian workers into Aruba, the Bahamas, Curacao, the Dominican Republic, French Guyana, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Martinique, Sint Maarten and the Turks and Caicos, so money now moves between one Haitian settlement abroad and another as well as toward the island. Staff work in French, English, Spanish and Creole.

Pottery excavated at sites in Puerto Rico and the islands beside it comes in two styles of the same date, and archaeologists have argued for thirty years about what that means. Irving Rouse and others treated the makers of the Huecoid wares as part of the same cultural stock as their neighbours, holding that a difference in decoration is not a difference in people. Luis Chanlatte Baik argued the opposite, that the pottery and the carved stone ornaments of these sites are distinct enough to mark a tradition with its own origin. The dispute went nowhere for a long time, because the evidence was thin and each side could read the same sherds either way. Excavation with controlled stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating has since settled part of it, mostly by establishing which deposits are genuinely contemporary. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show a limit of their discipline. Ethnic and social boundaries in the ancient Caribbean have to be inferred from what people threw away, and objects move between communities more easily than identities do.