The dead move out of the plaza and into the house

For centuries the Saladoid villages of the Greater Antilles buried their dead in the open ground at the centre of the settlement. Sites like Maisabel and Tibes in Puerto Rico were laid out as circles or horseshoes of houses around a cleared plaza, and the graves went into that plaza, where everyone lived around them. From about 500 CE the practice changes. The dead begin going into the floors of houses. Caves and middens continued to receive burials, and the interior of the home became a principal place to keep the ancestors. A change of that kind is a change in who the dead belong to. In the plaza they were the community's. Under the floor they are the household's and the lineage's. Ritual focus narrows to the family, and the house takes over the job the public space had been doing. The layout of a village is a diagram of its social arrangements, and this one was redrawn over a few generations.

Fighting resumed in 651 and an Arab force of five thousand under Abd Allah b. Sa'd marched on Old Dongola, the capital of Makuria, battering the cathedral with catapults. The peace that followed was set down as a covenant binding Nubians from the frontier of Aswan to the border of Alwa. Neither side would raid the other. Each could pass through the other's territory without settling in it. The Nubians would send back runaway slaves and Muslim fugitives, and would sweep, light and protect the mosque built in the courtyard of their capital. Every year they were to hand over 360 people to the governor at Aswan, male and female, the finest of the country, none of them elderly and none below puberty. Food, cloth and wine came back the other way. A scribe dated the text to Ramadan of the year thirty one. The arrangement held for roughly five hundred years.

By about 900 the Meillacoid tradition had become the dominant pottery of the northern Caribbean, spreading across communities that had previously made quite different things. The vessels themselves are plain: unpolished, decorated with narrow incisions, applied pieces and punched marks, made to be used. What travelled with the style was a way of farming. Meillacoid communities intensified swidden cultivation, clearing and burning plots and working them in rotation, probably with new crops arriving from South America. That shift moved people off the coasts and mangrove edges and up onto hilltops, because the priority had become access to workable soil rather than access to the shore. The sea did not stop mattering. Marine food stayed a large part of the diet, and the villages on the ridges kept sending people down to fish. The picture is of societies converging on a shared set of practices across island boundaries, which is what transculturation looks like in the ground.

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.