Cuban potters were firing clay before the Ceramic Age migrations

Excavations at the Corinthia III site in Cuba turned up some of the earliest known Archaic Age pottery in the Caribbean. The find matters because the standard scheme awards pottery to the Ceramic Age migrations that arrived later out of South America, with Archaic peoples cast as foragers who did without it. The Cuban vessels show people working clay well before those migrations reached the island, alongside a move towards more settled living in the Late Archaic. Keegan and Hofman use the case against the period boundaries themselves. Archaeological ages are labels applied afterwards by researchers dividing up a continuum, and the material keeps crossing the lines drawn for it. What the Corinthia III pottery records is a wide range of practice across the archipelago, with communities inventing and adopting at their own pace. The people of the islands were doing their own experimenting, on their own schedule, for centuries before anyone brought them anything.

The El Convento site on the northern coast of Puerto Rico has produced the earliest radiocarbon assay for the Huecoid, one of the two ceramic traditions present at the opening of the Ceramic Age in the region. The date is a problem for the accepted model, which has these groups moving slowly from east to west along the island's north coast. At Maisabel the sequence points the same way. Huecoid ceramics were found in a sealed layer directly beneath deposits of the Hacienda Grande style, which is Saladoid. Sealed stratification is the strongest evidence archaeology offers, because a layer under an undisturbed layer is older and no argument changes that. Together the two sites suggest the Huecoid were established in parts of Puerto Rico earlier than at eastern sites such as La Hueca, where the tradition was first defined. Migration maps for the first pottery-making societies of the Caribbean are being redrawn around dates like these.

By about 250 BCE, on the radiocarbon evidence Rouse reviews, the Cedrosan Saladoid migration had reached the northern West Indies. The colonists were selective about where they stopped. They favoured high, mountainous islands, which hold rain, carry rivers and support the luxuriant forest their farming needed. Flat, dry islands were passed over. That preference explains a good deal of later Caribbean settlement, including on Hispaniola, whose mountains and well watered valleys made it one of the most heavily populated islands in the region by 1492. This is farming logic applied to an archipelago by people who had crossed open water to reach it. They knew which land would grow their crops and they chose accordingly, across a chain more than a thousand kilometres long. The indigenous history of Haiti begins with decisions of this kind, taken two thousand years before the Spanish arrived and recorded now in charcoal, potsherds and dates.