Farmers push up the rivers of the eastern Dominican Republic

In the eastern Dominican Republic the phase archaeologists call Atajadizo marks the point where Chicoid pottery starts turning up alongside older Ostionoid wares. The pottery is the marker; the change underneath it is agricultural. Communities were moving up the rivers into the interior of the island and planting the terraces along them, which is a heavier commitment than coastal gardening and returns more. Maize is present in the interior by about 1060, growing next to the manioc that had been the staple for centuries. Houses from this phase are large enough to hold thirty or forty people, meaning extended families under one roof rather than scattered household plots. Each of those facts requires the others. More land under cultivation supports larger households, larger households supply the labour that clears and maintains river terraces, and a second staple crop protects the whole arrangement against the failure of the first. This is the shape Hispaniola was taking five hundred years before the Spanish saw it.

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.

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.

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.