Most people stayed in one valley and a few kept moving

Isotope work on human remains from sites across Puerto Rico gives a rough census of who moved. Most individuals tested spent their whole lives inside a single river valley, near where they were born. A steady minority did not, and their movement runs between the coast and the interior of the island. That minority deserves attention out of proportion to its size, because people who move carry goods, news, techniques and marriage ties with them, and internal traffic of that kind is what holds an island together as one society instead of a collection of valleys. The same analyses describe the diet. It balanced land animals, chiefly the hutia, Isolobodon portoricensis, a large rodent the islanders kept and ate, against a wide range of reef and offshore fish and the crops grown in garden plots. G. R. DuChemin and others built this picture out of bone chemistry, which reports on lives that left no other record.

Ghana began around the year 300 under princes described in Arab accounts as white, and their line held power for about seven centuries before Soninke rulers, who were black, took the throne. The new dynasty pushed its conquests into the desert and subdued Berber populations there. By the year 1000 the Arab geographers al Bakri and al Idrisi were describing a state of real political weight and material wealth. Ghana lived on its position between north and south. It was the depot for salt cut from the mines of Tatental in the Sahara, a substance so scarce in central Africa that it sometimes served as money alongside gold and silver, and it was the great market for gold dust and nuggets carried up from the fields south of the Senegal river. That wealth drew raiders. Abu Bakr ibn Umar, the Almoravid ruler who had taken southern Morocco and the whole Sahara, invaded the empire and destroyed it.

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.

Around 1200 the potters of Saba began decorating their vessels in the Chicoid manner, a style whose heartland lay in Hispaniola several hundred kilometres to the west. The same influence appears at the same time on St John, St Croix, St Martin and Anguilla. Five small islands, separated from each other and from Hispaniola by open water, took up a shared visual language. Pottery decoration is one of the ways a community states what it belongs to, and this change means the northern Lesser Antilles were participating in something centred elsewhere and were content to show it. Archaeologists use the pattern to define the Eastern Taíno sphere, a zone of sustained interaction rather than a political unit. The picture of small islands developing in isolation, each community working out its own answers alone, cannot survive this evidence. These places were in constant conversation, and the conversation moved along the same canoe routes that carried food, stone and people.