The first islanders moved on a calendar of their own making

The Antillean preceramic period is organised around what archaeologists call a collector mode of life. People kept mobile settlements and timed their movements to resources that came available in a particular season. M. Veloz Maggiolo and A. G. Pantel set out the pattern: a structured yearly cycle running between coastal stations where shellfish were gathered and inland camps used for hunting and plant collection. Those movements were planned. They depended on knowing, across a whole archipelago, where the food would be and when, and on returning to the same places year after year. That knowledge is what made a stable human presence possible in the islands for three thousand years before anyone there made pottery. It also did not disappear. The ceramic age societies that followed inherited the environmental knowledge along with the territory, which is one reason the Taino could feed a dense population on land that European planters later declared exhausted.

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.

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.

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.