A workshop on Vieques cuts jade that came from the mainland

The site of Sorce, also called La Hueca, on the island of Vieques off Puerto Rico, held one of the finest lapidary workshops in the ancient Caribbean. Its craftsmen cut beads and amulets from nephrite and jadeite, stone that does not occur on Vieques. The suggested origins run as far as Guatemala or the interior of the Dominican Republic, and the serpentinite worked at the same site most likely came from Puerto Rico. Grenada, at the other end of the chain, had a comparable specialism at the Pearls site, where the material was amethyst. Objects like these were made to be worn, given and buried, and they announced who the wearer was and where the wearer stood. That is why they travelled. A maritime economy in prestige goods tied the Greater Antilles to the Lesser Antilles centuries before Europeans arrived and described the islands as isolated and their people as having nothing worth trading.

Fighting resumed in 651 and an Arab force of five thousand under Abd Allah b. Sa'd marched on Old Dongola, the capital of Makuria, battering the cathedral with catapults. The peace that followed was set down as a covenant binding Nubians from the frontier of Aswan to the border of Alwa. Neither side would raid the other. Each could pass through the other's territory without settling in it. The Nubians would send back runaway slaves and Muslim fugitives, and would sweep, light and protect the mosque built in the courtyard of their capital. Every year they were to hand over 360 people to the governor at Aswan, male and female, the finest of the country, none of them elderly and none below puberty. Food, cloth and wine came back the other way. A scribe dated the text to Ramadan of the year thirty one. The arrangement held for roughly five hundred years.

By about 900 the Meillacoid tradition had become the dominant pottery of the northern Caribbean, spreading across communities that had previously made quite different things. The vessels themselves are plain: unpolished, decorated with narrow incisions, applied pieces and punched marks, made to be used. What travelled with the style was a way of farming. Meillacoid communities intensified swidden cultivation, clearing and burning plots and working them in rotation, probably with new crops arriving from South America. That shift moved people off the coasts and mangrove edges and up onto hilltops, because the priority had become access to workable soil rather than access to the shore. The sea did not stop mattering. Marine food stayed a large part of the diet, and the villages on the ridges kept sending people down to fish. The picture is of societies converging on a shared set of practices across island boundaries, which is what transculturation looks like in the ground.

Around 860 the pottery made in northeastern Haiti settles into the style archaeologists call Macady, and its appearance defines the local Ostionan period. Style names are shorthand for something harder to see. Potters learn from other potters, so a distinct and consistent way of shaping and finishing vessels indicates a community large enough and stable enough to pass a craft down, and a region whose people were in regular contact with each other and less so with their neighbours. Sites of this period become both more numerous and denser with material, which archaeologists read as population growth resting on more productive farming. Regional differentiation follows: the north east begins to look like itself rather than like a province of somewhere else. This is the same coast Columbus reached in 1492, and it had been continuously inhabited, farmed and organised for more than six centuries by the time he described it as new.