A flint quarry nobody could live beside held the islands together

Settlement in the early Archaic Lesser Antilles was split between two kinds of place. There were domestic sites, chosen for water, shelter and food, and there were resource outposts, chosen for what could be taken out of them. The best flint on Antigua came from ground that was no good to live on, which forced a rhythm of movement between the two. That flint reaches virtually every contemporary site in the northern part of the chain. Keegan and Hofman treat it as a lifeline holding a scattered population together, and they insist the arrangement was designed. The first islanders had worked out the geology and the ecology of the archipelago in enough detail to know which island held what, and they built a mobile and flexible social system around that knowledge. Reaching these islands took navigation. Staying in them took an economy, and the economy ran on a rock quarried at a place nobody could inhabit.

Across West Africa, in patrilineal and matrilineal societies alike, women have long acted as independent economic and social agents, and the reason is structural. Marriage there did not make a woman a dependent of her husband. In the trades and occupations women carried on, they owned what their labour produced. The largest commercial operators in recent Nigerian history have frequently been women, and the record shows women as major traders in that region in earlier centuries too, Muslim women among them as well as followers of the older Niger-Congo religion. In the territories absorbed in the fourteenth century CE into the kingdom of Benin, the weavers of cotton and raffia cloth were women. That cloth was the main export of the state, through the slave trade era included, and the women who made it controlled access to it and took the profit from it. The wealth of a West African kingdom rested on the enterprise of women, over a wide area and many centuries.

Sites in Haiti have produced lithic workshops given over to making large flaked-stone blades, with concentrations in the Casimira and Las Alejandrinas areas. The output is specialised. These are a standard product turned out in numbers at a place chosen for its stone, rather than general-purpose flakes struck as the need arose. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo and Jose Cruxent were among the first to document the complexes, and the size and frequency of the blades became the main indicator archaeologists use when dating preceramic sites in the region. Making blades in bulk at a quarry implies mobility, since the people using them lived elsewhere and moved between the source and the coast. It also puts Haiti near the centre of the question of how human beings first spread into the Greater Antilles, because these workshops are among the best evidence for how that expansion was supplied. Around 3000 BCE this island was producing tools for a wider region.

Jolly Beach sits on the west coast of Antigua, looking out over reefs and a productive stretch of shallow sea. Around 2000 BCE the people there were making sophisticated flint blades, which sets the site apart from the general run of early stone working in the islands. Their diet was wide. They took eight major species of mollusc, fish from shallow water, sea turtles and manatees. They also took far more land animals than the other coastal sites on Antigua from the same period, and that is the second thing marking Jolly Beach out. Better stone technology and a broader food base together suggest a place people used for longer stretches, or for more purposes, than the camps around it. Two settlements on one small island, a short walk apart, could run on different economies. Archaic populations in the Caribbean read the ground in front of them and adapted site by site.