Barrancoid pots arrive and the northern islands go their own way

From about 350 CE the pottery of the eastern Caribbean starts carrying Barrancoid traits, a style out of South America, alongside and then in place of the older Saladoid wares. The traits arrive as a set, which tells archaeologists that contact with the mainland was continuing and mattered enough to change what island potters made. The effect was uneven. In the southern islands, nearest the continent, the mainland influence is strong. In the northern Caribbean, over the same stretch of time, local styles begin to pull away and look like themselves. That divergence marks the point at which island populations, now larger and more numerous, had less need of the South American country their ancestors had left. Ceramic series are the main instrument available for reading any of this, since these societies left no writing. Watching decoration change from island to island and generation to generation is how the shape of social and political networks across the archipelago gets reconstructed at all.

Around the middle of the fifth century CE, people speaking Arawakan languages arrived on Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire, the islands lying off the coast of Venezuela, and brought pottery making with them. Their arrival marks the start of the Ceramic age on those islands. Somebody was already there. The earlier inhabitants belonged to the Archaic age, made a simpler set of tools, and are physically distinguishable in the skeletal record by the shape of the skull. They were displaced. Rouse records the sequence in the flat language of archaeology, and the flatness is worth noticing, because the displacement of one population by another is a thing that happens to people. These three islands sit where the South American mainland meets the Caribbean, which makes them a gauge for movements that later reached the whole chain of the Antilles. What happened here in the fifth century had happened elsewhere before and would happen again, long before any European ship arrived to start the count.