The plaza dead may have been carried home to be buried

Saladoid villages put their graves in the plaza at the centre of the settlement, and there are two readings of why. The first is ancestor veneration. The dead lie in the ground where the community assembles, present at every ritual held there, and the plaza works as an axis joining the underworld of the ancestors to the world of the living and the sky world of the spirits. The second reading is about movement. Under it the plaza graves record post mortem mobility, in which a person who had spent adult life in another village was carried back to the cemetery of the clan they were born into, so the burial is a homecoming. That version makes the grave a piece of long distance social machinery, binding scattered island communities through kinship claims that outlived the individual. The two explanations sit together comfortably. Either way, where a body went into the ground was decided by rules reaching well beyond the household doing the digging.

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.

Speakers of Old French inherited a noun, puison, from the Latin word for a drink, and it kept both the senses Latin had carried. A puison could be a medicine and it could kill. Around 1130 they built something new out of it, the verb empoisonner, which meant to kill by poison and carried no other sense. By the end of the thirteenth century they had added a noun for the person who did it. Anglo Norman speakers took the verb across the channel in the fourteenth century, shortened it, and made their own word for the doer. The direction of the change is the evidence. Nobody needed a verb meaning to give medicine. People needed a word for a particular fear, and once the word for the person existed, the person existed as a type. The French colonists who reached the Caribbean four centuries later brought this vocabulary with them and applied it to the enslaved.

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.