Stone workers at Barrera-Mordan push Antillean settlement back

Barrera-Mordan, in the Dominican Republic, is one of the sites that forced archaeologists to move the date of human arrival in the northern Caribbean. The material there is a stone-working complex built on flaked tools struck from cores, and it dates to around 4000 BCE. The people who made it belong to what is labelled the Lithic age. They had no pottery, and they should not be confused with the ceramic-producing groups who reached the islands thousands of years afterwards and are far better known. What the assemblage records is a specialised adaptation, worked out for a set of islands with particular stone, particular coastlines and particular food. Sites like this are how the initial migration routes from the surrounding mainland get mapped, because the tool types are the trail. Hispaniola, the island Haiti shares, was inhabited about six thousand years ago by people who knew exactly what they were doing with rock.

Copper was in use before anyone learned to smelt it. It occurs here and there as native copper, relatively pure pieces sitting inside the ore, and those can be hammered cold into shape. People did this in several parts of Africa and Eurasia, and the makers of the Old Copper Complex around the North American Great Lakes were doing it six thousand years ago. Getting metal out of ore is a different problem. It needs sustained high temperature under control, and in every region where it happened, smelting arrived only after ceramic technology was already known there. The kiln comes first and the furnace follows. That dependency has a consequence worth stating plainly. Ceramics were invented independently in Africa, among the oldest anywhere, by communities in the Sahara. The technology that made a fired pot possible is the technology that eventually made a smelter possible. Bronze and iron both rest on a foundation laid by potters.

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.