Pestles link eastern Puerto Rico to a site in Trinidad

The Ortoiroid series begins in Trinidad and works its way up the Lesser Antilles toward Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands across a long span, from around 3000 BCE to a few centuries before the common era. The Cayo Cofresi complex in eastern Puerto Rico belongs to that series and is marked out by well-formed ground-stone pestles. Those pestles resemble artefacts from Banwari Trace in Trinidad closely enough that the connection is hard to explain any other way. Trinidad sits within sight of the South American mainland, so a chain of resemblances running from there to Puerto Rico traces a route people actually travelled, island by island, with their tool traditions intact. Local complexes along the way show the tradition adapting as it went north, to different stone, different coastlines and different food. The Antilles were a corridor with traffic on it for three thousand years before anyone in Europe had heard of them.

The evidence is indirect and it points to small states in Aïr, in West Africa, by 1000 BCE or earlier. The Nok region of Nigeria appears to have held an early strong state during the first millennium BCE, and its wealth most likely came from trading the metals found in its territory. Nok is famous for something else. Its terracotta heads and figures are among the earliest known figurative sculpture in West Africa and they sit in museums around the world, captioned as art and nothing more. The political economy behind the workshops goes unmentioned. Sculpture of that quality in that quantity implies patrons, and the patrons were living off control of metal and the trade in it. Together with Aïr, the finding puts political complexity in the Sudan belt at 1000 BCE or earlier. That is contemporary with the first Iron Age states around the African Great Lakes, and centuries before the gold trade that made Ghana, Mali and Songhay rich.

Hispaniola had ground sloths, large slow herbivores of a kind that had vanished from most of the Americas thousands of years earlier. Archaeological evidence places them still living in the Cordillera Central, the mountainous spine of the island, during the second millennium BCE and as late as roughly 800 BCE. They survived in the interior long after the coasts were settled. What ended them appears to have been the people. Rouse connects the extinction to the development of Courian hunting technology, a set of improved stone tools that made the highlands worth working. Once the interior could be hunted efficiently, a slow animal with no experience of predators had a short future ahead of it. This is the earliest documented case of human beings changing the ecology of the island that became Haiti and the Dominican Republic. The pattern set here, of an interior resource used until it is gone, repeats on the same mountains three thousand years later with the trees.