Three women are killed in two years and are named

Anise Boisrond was twenty two years old when she was dismembered and decapitated in 2020. Evelyne Sincere was twenty two when she was raped, brutalised and murdered in 2020. Antoinette Duclaire was thirty three, a journalist working on human rights, when she was killed in 2021. They stand in a line that runs back at least to Alerte Belance, who was mutilated by paramilitaries after the military coup of 1991 and survived to say so in public. Belance closes a chapter of Edwidge Danticat's Create Dangerously by asking people of conscience to hear her and to hear what she has been through. Naming these three is a deliberate act, because the killing of Haitian women in these years is otherwise carried in the record as a number with no faces in it. Three decades separate Belance from Duclaire, and in both cases armed men were acting on a woman's body with nothing to stop them.

The website Marronnage in Saint-Domingue transcribes advertisements for enslaved people who had run, together with the lists jails kept of those recaptured. Every document appears twice, as a photograph of the original page and as a searchable transcription. By 2020 the project had taken in material from newspapers in Guadeloupe, Guyane, Jamaica, Louisiana, Lower Canada and South Carolina, and was renaming itself Marronnage in the Atlantic World. Those additions carried the advertisements to 15,638 and the jail lists to 6,846. The figure the site gives for people identified, 22,638, cannot be right. An advertisement usually named one person and occasionally a few, while a jail list was generally longer and sometimes very much longer, so the count of individuals recorded has to be considerably higher. Jail lists appear to be peculiar to the French colonies, which is why historians have rarely been able to compare who escaped with who was caught. Saint-Domingue still supplies most of the material.

A recent genetics paper concluded that the ancient Egyptians were of Levantine origin. The DNA behind it came from a single locality in northern Egypt, dating to more than two thousand years after Egyptian civilisation was founded, in a district that had been absorbing arrivals from the Levant for over a millennium by that point. Some came as artisans and makers of valued goods whom Egyptian rulers invited in and settled. The Hyksos invaded out of the Levant in the seventeenth century BCE and governed much of the north for more than a hundred years, adding the same ancestry to that same corner of the country. Christopher Ehret answers the paper with a comparison. Take DNA from a South Boston graveyard filled in the 1890s and the sample will report that Americans are of Irish descent, and that the men who founded the United States a century before that were Irish too. The method fails identically in both cases. A late and heavily settled edge of a country is made to speak for a founding population it never held.

Anyone taught anything about the Caribbean before Columbus was probably taught two peoples: the gentle Arawak, who were wiped out, and the fierce Carib, who ate them. James Michener sold the pair to millions of readers and early archaeology supplied the labels. William Keegan and Corinne Hofman argue that the division is a filing system rather than a finding. The islands held enormous variety in language, settlement, craft and politics, and communities built shifting alliances across water in ways a two tribe scheme cannot hold. The excavated record shows no series of clean displacements in which one people replaces another. It shows a kaleidoscope, their word, of movement and mixture, with goods, techniques, styles and people crossing between the islands and to and from the mainland for thousands of years. This matters for Haiti. The island that became Saint-Domingue is usually granted a single indigenous population that vanished, which is an easier story to tell than the one the sites support.