Head shaping in infancy marked which people you belonged to

Across the pre Columbian Caribbean, infants had their heads shaped. The work was done in the first months of life, while the skull is still soft, by binding or by boards, and the result was permanent. A. van Duijvenbode's research reads the modified skulls as identity markers. The shape a person carried announced the lineage or the social rank they had been born into, and it announced it for life to everyone they met. The styles vary from island to island, which means the technique was local while the idea behind it was regional. Communities agreed that a head should be shaped and disagreed about the shape. This is one of the few direct records of what these people considered beautiful and how they made social position visible. They marked it on the body itself, in the one place it could not be removed, lost or given away.

Arab armies took Egypt in 642 and pushed south against the Christian kingdoms of the Upper Nile. Nubia fought hard and had little gold or grain worth seizing, so in 652 the two sides settled on terms. No Muslim would enter the country. In return Nubia would hand over a fixed number of enslaved people every year, receiving other goods in exchange. The agreement was called the Baqt and it appears to have held for several hundred years. Under its shelter the kingdoms of Makuria, whose capital stood at Dongola, and Alwa, centred on Soba near modern Khartoum, built cathedrals and monasteries at Faras, Qasr Ibrim, Sai and elsewhere and covered their walls with paintings. This is one of the oldest recorded arrangements in which an African state agreed to deliver human beings on a schedule as the price of being left alone, and it ran for centuries before any European ship reached the Atlantic coast.

By about 1200 the societies of the Greater Antilles were building stone lined ball courts, and the courts are how archaeologists mark the arrival of what they call the Formative age. A ball court is a permanent public work. It has to be sited, cleared, lined with worked stone and then maintained, and it exists only where somebody can command labour for a project that grows no food. What happened in these courts was the political and religious life of a chiefdom: games between communities, ceremonies, the settling of rank and obligation in front of an audience. The chiefdoms the Spanish met on Hispaniola three centuries later, with paramount caciques, tribute and inherited standing, were the mature form of this arrangement. Those institutions had been under construction here for three hundred years before any European described them, and the ball courts are what remains of the places where people gathered to watch them work.

By about 1200 the Chicoid culture on Hispaniola had matured into what we call Taíno. Caciques ruled defined territories. Villages had plazas and bateyes, the ball courts where a game that was also a legal and religious proceeding got played. Cassava agriculture on conucos fed dense settlement. Zemís carried the cosmology. The island was not empty and it was not simple, and it had been running like this for roughly three hundred years before a single European saw it. Here is the part that survives into everything after. Ayiti is a Taíno word. Bohio and Quisqueya are Taíno words. Kanzo, barbecue, hammock, hurricane, canoe, tobacco, maize, all of it. When people say the Taíno were exterminated, they are describing what happened to the population and missing what happened to the vocabulary, the crops, and the maps.