The first islanders' descendants shaped the culture Europeans met

The Ostionoid societies of Puerto Rico were assembled on the island out of everything already there. They relied more heavily on pottery than their predecessors had, while keeping the stone tool industry of the Archaic Age, and they ate from the sea, with marine molluscs central to the diet. Each of those elements has a different pedigree. The pottery descends from the Saladoid colonists, the stonework from the first inhabitants of the island, the diet from the coast itself. What emerged was a single culture with an identity of its own, formed as the incoming Saladoid population was absorbed into the landscape and its people. Archaeologists call the process transculturation. The practical result is that descendants of the first islanders had a hand in the aesthetics and the technology of everyone who came after them. The societies Columbus met in the Greater Antilles were the product of this long blending, and their variety was built over the preceding thousand years.

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.

Around 860 the pottery made in northeastern Haiti settles into the style archaeologists call Macady, and its appearance defines the local Ostionan period. Style names are shorthand for something harder to see. Potters learn from other potters, so a distinct and consistent way of shaping and finishing vessels indicates a community large enough and stable enough to pass a craft down, and a region whose people were in regular contact with each other and less so with their neighbours. Sites of this period become both more numerous and denser with material, which archaeologists read as population growth resting on more productive farming. Regional differentiation follows: the north east begins to look like itself rather than like a province of somewhere else. This is the same coast Columbus reached in 1492, and it had been continuously inhabited, farmed and organised for more than six centuries by the time he described it as new.

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.