Three pottery styles turn out to be one set of neighbours

Archaeology in the northwest of what is now the Dominican Republic has changed what the pottery means. Jorge Ulloa Hung and the teams working with him at El Flaco and nearby settlements kept finding wares that specialists had assigned to separate peoples lying together in one deposit. Meillacoid, Chicoid and Ostionoid vessels were being made and used side by side within a single community. For most of the twentieth century each style was read as the signature of a distinct group, and the map of the island before 1492 was drawn as a set of ethnic blocks pressing on one another. The pots do not support that map. They point to households that traded, married and lived across whatever boundaries the styles are supposed to mark, in a region thick with such contact in the centuries before the Spanish came. Keegan and Hofman call the resulting picture archipelagic: identity on these islands travelled with people and goods across water, and it settled nowhere for long.

The investigating judge in the Duvalier case set the crimes against humanity aside and sent the former president for life to the correctional tribunal for embezzlement of public funds. He claimed the question of crimes against humanity had never been put to him, which the prosecutor's own orders contradicted. He took no investigative step against the co-accused the prosecutor had named. The plaintiffs appealed. In February 2014 the court of appeal of Port-au-Prince overturned that decision. It held that the notion of crime against humanity forms part of international custom, that international custom forms part of Haitian domestic law, that the acts charged were crimes against humanity and were imprescriptible by their continuing character, and that serious evidence pointed to the responsibility of the accused for failing to prevent the crimes or punish those who committed them. It ordered every co-accused, plaintiff and witness named by the prosecution to be heard.

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.

A 2017 study by Baker, Rotimi and Shriner in Scientific Reports demonstrated that human ancestry correlates with language rather than with race, and that race is not an objective genomic classifier. Linguists and anthropologists had been saying this for most of a century. What the genomics did was close the last exit, because the racial categories inherited from the nineteenth century had been kept alive on the argument that biology might eventually vindicate them. It did not. I put this at the far end of a Haitian timeline for a specific reason. Haiti's 1805 constitution declared all citizens black regardless of complexion, which was a political act with no biological claim behind it and it was correct. The country made race a legal category it defined for itself, two hundred and twelve years before a genome paper confirmed there was nothing underneath the category to argue with.