Pestles, stone balls and axes widen the Archaic age diet

The flaked-stone complexes of the Greater Antilles are the best documented part of the early record, largely because struck stone survives well and is easy to recognise. The Archaic age is defined by something wider. Its assemblages carry ground stone and shell in quantity, including conical pestles, stone balls and axes of several types, all of them tools for processing rather than cutting. Barrera-Mordan in the Dominican Republic supplies the baseline collection. A pestle is evidence about food. It means seeds, roots and nuts were being pounded into something edible, which is a different subsistence strategy from hunting and shellfish gathering on their own. The shift in emphasis from flaked tools toward a varied ground-stone inventory tracks a broadening of what people ate and how they got it. Archaeologists also use the differences between these kits to separate one migration from another and to tell an incoming tradition from a local development. The kit is the identity card.

Across West Africa, in patrilineal and matrilineal societies alike, women have long acted as independent economic and social agents, and the reason is structural. Marriage there did not make a woman a dependent of her husband. In the trades and occupations women carried on, they owned what their labour produced. The largest commercial operators in recent Nigerian history have frequently been women, and the record shows women as major traders in that region in earlier centuries too, Muslim women among them as well as followers of the older Niger-Congo religion. In the territories absorbed in the fourteenth century CE into the kingdom of Benin, the weavers of cotton and raffia cloth were women. That cloth was the main export of the state, through the slave trade era included, and the women who made it controlled access to it and took the profit from it. The wealth of a West African kingdom rested on the enterprise of women, over a wide area and many centuries.

Vignier III sits in Haiti and it carries a radiocarbon date around 3630 BCE. That is the earliest firmly dated human habitation we have on the island. I want to sit with the number for a second, because the arithmetic does something to you. From Vignier III to 1804 is about fifty four centuries. From 1804 to today is a little over two. So more than ninety six percent of the human story on this island happened before the country existed, and almost all of that ninety six percent gets compressed into a single sentence about Taínos in most school curricula. That compression is not an accident of space. It is the shape colonial history gives to a place, where the clock only starts when Europeans arrive to look at it. This entry exists to start the clock earlier.

Jolly Beach sits on the west coast of Antigua, looking out over reefs and a productive stretch of shallow sea. Around 2000 BCE the people there were making sophisticated flint blades, which sets the site apart from the general run of early stone working in the islands. Their diet was wide. They took eight major species of mollusc, fish from shallow water, sea turtles and manatees. They also took far more land animals than the other coastal sites on Antigua from the same period, and that is the second thing marking Jolly Beach out. Better stone technology and a broader food base together suggest a place people used for longer stretches, or for more purposes, than the camps around it. Two settlements on one small island, a short walk apart, could run on different economies. Archaic populations in the Caribbean read the ground in front of them and adapted site by site.