Ortoiroid people worked the Trinidad coast for nearly five thousand years

Radiocarbon dates from sites on Trinidad place Ortoiroid people on the island from around 5230 BCE to about 470 BCE, a run of nearly five thousand years. That is a long occupation by any standard, and it covers the period in which Trinidad stopped being part of the South American mainland and became an island. These were coastal communities. They made specialised projectile points and barbs out of bone, and they adjusted their tools to the continental animals that Trinidad had inherited from the mainland and that the islands further north never received. Five thousand years is longer than the gap between the Ortoiroid and ourselves. It is longer than the whole history of writing. A Caribbean chronology that opens with Columbus is not starting early. It is arriving at the end of a story that had already been running on these coasts for fifty centuries.

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.

The Levisa rock shelter in Cuba holds a Lithic age deposit dated to 4190 BCE. It is among the earliest confirmed human occupations anywhere in the Caribbean islands. The people who left it worked stone, took what they needed from the rivers and the high ground behind them, and moved with the seasons rather than settling in one place. They were foragers, and the way they lived has to be kept separate from the Taino societies that European ships met almost six thousand years later. Those were farmers with villages, chiefs and ball courts, and they came out of a different tradition. This matters for how the region gets narrated. A Caribbean history that opens in 1492 treats the islands as empty until Europe arrives. A rock shelter in Cuba dated to 4190 BCE says the islands had been occupied for something like six thousand years by then, which makes the usual starting point a decision somebody took.

People reached the Caribbean islands in the fifth millennium BCE, and that is where the human history of the region begins. Far less is known about them than about the later communities who made pottery, and the reason is partly a matter of who did the work and in what language. Most of the primary research on the earliest inhabitants was carried out in Cuba and Hispaniola by local archaeologists working within Latin American Social Archaeology. They published in Spanish and used a theoretical framework unlike the one in use to the north. North American syntheses largely left their findings out, and the resulting picture of how the islands were first settled has been thin and in places out of date. This is worth naming plainly. The gap in the record is a gap in reading, and the people best placed to describe the first settlement of the Caribbean were the ones whose work went uncited.