Orinoco villages match the size of later Taino towns

For roughly fifteen centuries, from about 2140 BCE to about 620 BCE, the people Rouse grouped as the Ronquinan Saladoid subseries lived in the valley of the Orinoco. They built on the natural levees along the river, ground that the yearly flood renewed with fresh silt, which is the best farmland in that country and the reason the settlements stayed put. They cleared and burned their plots, cropped them, and moved to new ground while the old plots recovered. Their villages were permanent, and they were not small. Rouse measured them against the settlements of the Taino, the people who met Columbus, and found them comparable in size. That comparison is the part worth keeping. The Caribbean of 1492 did not begin in 1492. Its farming, its village scale and its pottery tradition run back to the Orinoco, where communities had been working the same riverbank arrangement since long before Rome existed.

African potters commonly fire their work in pits dug into the ground. Across the woodland savanna that runs from West Africa to the eastern edge of the Central African Republic, the ground is lateritic and heavy with iron oxide. The archaeologist Merrick Posnansky proposed that firing at high temperature in such pits would have produced small pieces of iron out of the soil itself, repeatedly, until somebody noticed. That is a plausible route to the discovery, and it puts the origin of the technology inside a craft that women had run for thousands of years. What happened next is a familiar sequence. Men took up smelting, built the rituals and symbols that assigned the work to them, and made the arrangement look ancient and proper. Women kept essential roles regardless, mining the ore, and in southern Africa and probably elsewhere shaping the ceramic tuyeres that carried air into the furnaces and the crucibles used for copper. The foundation was women's. The credit went elsewhere.

Around 1000 BCE Ortoiroid communities completed a long movement up the Lesser Antilles and reached Puerto Rico. Their arrival brought them within reach of a different world. Hispaniola, immediately west across the Mona Passage, was held by Casimiroid peoples who had entered the islands from another direction entirely and had been there for thousands of years. The two now shared a frontier. Rouse reads the archaeology of the following centuries as a flow of technique running northwest to southeast, from the Casimiroid side into the Ortoiroid one, carrying ways of flaking and grinding stone. That direction is the interesting part. The newcomers coming up the chain were the ones learning. Whatever the older population of Hispaniola had worked out about local stone over several millennia of residence was worth adopting, and it moved across the passage into Puerto Rico. The Mona Passage has been a channel of exchange for three thousand years, and Haiti sits on the western side of it.

Around 1500 BCE a distinct ceramic tradition, which archaeologists call the Barrancoid series, developed in the middle and lower stretches of the Orinoco valley in what is now Venezuela. Over time its makers moved downriver toward the coast. The people already holding that ground, the communities Rouse files under the Saladero heading, were pushed out of their positions along the river, and out of that disturbance came the subseries he named Cedrosan Saladoid. This is upstream bookkeeping that matters a great deal for Haiti. The Cedrosan Saladoid are the people who a thousand years later carried farming, pottery and village life out of South America and into the Antilles, island by island, until they reached Hispaniola. The population Columbus met in 1492 descended from them. So the chain that ends in the Taino villages of the north coast begins with a pottery style shifting position on a South American river three thousand years earlier.