The Saladoid bring farming and zemis into the West Indies

Between 500 and 200 BCE people of the Saladoid tradition moved out of the Orinoco valley in South America and up into the West Indies. They brought the first settled villages in the islands and the farming that supported them, above all the root crops that would feed island populations for the next fifteen centuries. They brought the zemis as well, the spirit figures that later Taino religion was built around. Rouse counts pottery, permanent villages and agriculture as the foundation on which Taino society was assembled. The change came slowly. Saladoid settlers moved into a chain already held by Archaic populations, and across generations they displaced some communities and absorbed others, so the transition reads as blending. That is the part worth holding on to. The people Columbus met on Hispaniola in 1492 were the outcome of a long indigenous history with its own migrations, religion and agriculture, and it had been running for two thousand years before he arrived.

A Greek commercial handbook of about 340 BC, later wrongly credited to Skylax, placed the island of Cerne twelve days' sail from the Straits of Gibraltar and said no ship could get past it for shallows, mud and weed. Phoenician merchants moored there, pitched tents on the island and ferried goods to the mainland in small boats. They took away hides of deer, lion, leopard and cattle, and the hides and tusks of elephants. The people they dealt with used ivory ornaments and cups, put ivory anklets on their women and ivory decoration on their horses, drove chariots, and made a great deal of wine from vines, which the merchants also carried off. In return came perfume, Egyptian stone, Attic pottery and jars. The tents suggest that the permanent colony Hanno had planted on Cerne was already abandoned. Cerne has never been located.

Excavations at the Corinthia III site in Cuba turned up some of the earliest known Archaic Age pottery in the Caribbean. The find matters because the standard scheme awards pottery to the Ceramic Age migrations that arrived later out of South America, with Archaic peoples cast as foragers who did without it. The Cuban vessels show people working clay well before those migrations reached the island, alongside a move towards more settled living in the Late Archaic. Keegan and Hofman use the case against the period boundaries themselves. Archaeological ages are labels applied afterwards by researchers dividing up a continuum, and the material keeps crossing the lines drawn for it. What the Corinthia III pottery records is a wide range of practice across the archipelago, with communities inventing and adopting at their own pace. The people of the islands were doing their own experimenting, on their own schedule, for centuries before anyone brought them anything.

The El Convento site on the northern coast of Puerto Rico has produced the earliest radiocarbon assay for the Huecoid, one of the two ceramic traditions present at the opening of the Ceramic Age in the region. The date is a problem for the accepted model, which has these groups moving slowly from east to west along the island's north coast. At Maisabel the sequence points the same way. Huecoid ceramics were found in a sealed layer directly beneath deposits of the Hacienda Grande style, which is Saladoid. Sealed stratification is the strongest evidence archaeology offers, because a layer under an undisturbed layer is older and no argument changes that. Together the two sites suggest the Huecoid were established in parts of Puerto Rico earlier than at eastern sites such as La Hueca, where the tradition was first defined. Migration maps for the first pottery-making societies of the Caribbean are being redrawn around dates like these.