Blades reach a Haitian coast that made none of them

Across Cuba and Hispaniola the Lithic age tool kit runs on macroblades, long flakes struck from prismatic cores of fine-grained chert and used without further retouching. In Puerto Rico the same technique was applied to chalcedony. At Savanne Carree No. 2 on the Haitian coast, half of the flaked stone recovered is blades. What is absent is the debris. No cores, none of the waste that piles up wherever stone is actually worked. The blanks were made somewhere else, at workshops inland or on another island, and carried to the coast finished. That single absence changes the picture of the period. It means these communities were moving raw material and manufactured goods across distance, by exchange or by organised expeditions to the quarry, and that somebody was keeping track of where good chert came from. Between roughly 4000 and 1000 BCE the Caribbean already had supply lines. Nobody was living off whatever happened to be underfoot.

The First Dynasty royal tombs at Abydos hold more than kings. Around them lie the graves of retainers and high-status people put there to accompany the ruler and look after him afterwards. Hor-Aha has thirty-six such burials. His successor Djer has as many as three hundred and eighteen. Djet has one hundred and fifty-four, and Den, the fifth ruler, has one hundred and thirty-five. The practice was neither confined to Egypt nor started there. It appears equally early further south, it was still going in the second millennium BCE at the height of the Kerma kingdom on the Upper Nubian Nile, and it recurs across a long line of Nilo-Saharan-speaking or Nilo-Saharan-influenced states in the Sudan belt, from pre-Christian Nubia to the Wagadu empire of the Ghana in the ninth century CE. Egypt is one branch of that tradition. It kept retainer burial for a few generations and then let it go.

The Archaic age inhabitants of the Greater Antilles left a distinctive kit. It combines flaked stone, struck to an edge, with ground stone shaped by abrasion into heavier working tools. Barrera-Mordan in the Dominican Republic is one of the sites where that combination is clearest, and it shows people who had settled into a structured way of living rather than passing through. They had adapted to the environments of large tropical islands, which takes some learning. For a long time the Caribbean was written up as a late-settled region, a backwater at the edge of the American story where people arrived shortly before Europeans did. Assemblages like this one dismantle that. Human beings were present in the northern islands around 4000 BCE, organised enough to leave recognisable technological traditions, and those traditions differ from island to island in ways that let archaeologists follow them. The islands were a settled world with a history of their own long before anyone drew them on a chart.

Vignier III sits near the coast of Haiti and was occupied around 3630 BCE by Casimiroid people, among the earliest populations known in the Greater Antilles. What survives of them is mostly shell. The deposit is thick with it, which is the ordinary signature of a community taking a large part of its food from the shoreline, from the shallows and the reef rather than from farmland. That is a workable diet in this archipelago and it supported people here for thousands of years. I put a shell heap on a Haitian timeline for one reason. The country is usually introduced through 1804, or through 1492 if the account reaches back that far. Occupation of this ground runs about five and a half thousand years, and the first people to live on it were feeding themselves from the same water that later carried the ships. Haiti has a prehistory, and it has a physical address.