Pottery and permanent fields mark the Early Ceramic Age

Between roughly 400 BCE and 500 CE the islands fill with pottery and with settlements meant to last. The type sites are Trants on Montserrat and Hacienda Grande in Puerto Rico, both of which produced ceramics of a finish and complexity that archaeologists still use to define the period. The pottery matters for what it implies about everything else. Fired vessels are heavy, breakable and worth making only for people who intend to stay where they are, cook stored food and hold a surplus. The communities involved are usually associated with the Saladoid culture, and they ran maritime exchange over long distances between islands. Their surviving objects carry the symbolic work too, the designs and figures through which these societies said what they believed and who they were. Keegan and Hofman read the period as a shift in social organisation. A thousand years of Caribbean village life sits here, all of it before any European saw the region.

The Council of Nicaea met in 325 CE to settle what Christians were required to believe about the nature of Christ. The argument was carried by Alexander, the Egyptian patriarch of Alexandria, and by his student Athanasius, who between them defeated the position that Christ was a created being. Out of the council came the doctrine of the Trinity and the statement of belief still recited as the Nicene Creed. Every later century of Christian theology in Europe was built on that foundation, and it was fixed in place by two men from Egypt. The other decisive figure of the period was also African. Augustine was born in the fourth century at Hippo, in what is now Algeria, of Amazigh descent, and his writing on sin, grace, predestination and the standing of the church shaped Catholic doctrine for sixteen hundred years and handed the Protestant reformers their arguments as well. He learned his trade inside an African intellectual tradition that had already produced Tertullian and Cyprian.

Latin speakers had a single word family for substances that acted in ways nobody could watch. Uenenum covered a potent herb, a magical influence and a poison, and out of it came a verb meaning to bewitch or to infect, a noun for the act itself, and uenefucus, a word for the person who did such things, used of men and of women. In the late republic the Roman state grew worried enough about those people to pass a law in 81 BCE against causing sudden or unexpected death by concealed means, whether the means were chemical or magical. The law treated the two as one offence. Sixteen centuries later, courts in Martinique and Suriname were still hearing cases in which nobody could say whether the accused had used a plant, a powder or a spell, and the statutes they used descended from this one. The vocabulary carried the ambiguity across two thousand years.

Around the middle of the fifth century CE, people speaking Arawakan languages arrived on Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire, the islands lying off the coast of Venezuela, and brought pottery making with them. Their arrival marks the start of the Ceramic age on those islands. Somebody was already there. The earlier inhabitants belonged to the Archaic age, made a simpler set of tools, and are physically distinguishable in the skeletal record by the shape of the skull. They were displaced. Rouse records the sequence in the flat language of archaeology, and the flatness is worth noticing, because the displacement of one population by another is a thing that happens to people. These three islands sit where the South American mainland meets the Caribbean, which makes them a gauge for movements that later reached the whole chain of the Antilles. What happened here in the fifth century had happened elsewhere before and would happen again, long before any European ship arrived to start the count.