Rare stone was how an ambitious man built a following

The rare stone in Caribbean village middens is evidence about politics. Carnelian, jadeite and amethyst appear in early Saladoid and Huecoid deposits as beads and amulets, and Keegan and Hofman read them as the working equipment of what anthropologists call a Big Man, a leader with no inherited office who holds a following by controlling something scarce and giving it away well. Command of a mineral source, and of the skilled hands that turn it into ornament, is exactly that kind of asset. Burying the finished pieces in village refuse or in graves belongs to the same method, since a gift that goes into the ground is a gift nobody can take back or resell. Read this way the ornaments are the instruments by which particular people built standing and held communities together across long stretches of water. It puts ambition and rivalry into a period usually discussed in terms of pottery styles.

Arab armies took Egypt in 642 and pushed south against the Christian kingdoms of the Upper Nile. Nubia fought hard and had little gold or grain worth seizing, so in 652 the two sides settled on terms. No Muslim would enter the country. In return Nubia would hand over a fixed number of enslaved people every year, receiving other goods in exchange. The agreement was called the Baqt and it appears to have held for several hundred years. Under its shelter the kingdoms of Makuria, whose capital stood at Dongola, and Alwa, centred on Soba near modern Khartoum, built cathedrals and monasteries at Faras, Qasr Ibrim, Sai and elsewhere and covered their walls with paintings. This is one of the oldest recorded arrangements in which an African state agreed to deliver human beings on a schedule as the price of being left alone, and it ran for centuries before any European ship reached the Atlantic coast.

At Cerrillo, in the west of Puerto Rico, there is a place where people went to work flint. It reads as a workshop rather than a village, since the ground holds the waste of tool manufacture, the flakes and rejected pieces that come off shaping a nodule into something usable. Cerrillo was busiest during the changeover into the Ceramic age, when pottery was being adopted and settlement was reorganising, and the flint had been quarried there before that. The evidence indicates people were taking nodules out of the same deposit back in the Archaic age. That continuity is the interesting part. A source of good stone gets found once and then used for as long as anyone needs stone, across changes in pottery, diet and social arrangement that archaeologists treat as boundaries between cultures. The people at the flint outcrop in the seventh century were going to a place their predecessors had gone to for centuries, for the same reason.

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.