Every Archaic site in Puerto Rico is filed under one label

Archaeologists group all the known Archaic age sites of Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands into a single series called Ortoiroid. Underneath that heading are local styles that differ from one another, and the Coroso complex on Vieques Island is one of them. Coroso is identified by its use of pebble tools as percussors, hammer stones for striking flakes, and the assemblages it produces look closely related to those of the northern Lesser Antilles. Classification of this kind is a working tool rather than a claim about who anybody was. It lets specific technologies be tracked as they move across the northeastern Caribbean, and it lets the material of one island be compared with another's on the same terms. Following the complexes is how the social networks and the migration paths of the first islanders get reconstructed. The people who left this material did not think of themselves as Ortoiroid, and the label is what makes their movements visible.

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 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.