A village of five hundred rings its plaza with its own rubbish

The Juanpedro site in the Dominican Republic held something like five hundred people, which makes it a town by the standards of the eleventh century Caribbean. The village was laid out around a cleared central plaza, with the houses standing in a ring facing it. Around the outside ran a bank of accumulated refuse, the calzeda, built up over generations from what each household discarded. That ring is now the best evidence for the layout, since it maps where the houses were long after the houses themselves rotted away. The material in it is dense with animal bone and with Ostionoid pottery. A settlement of this size does not organise itself. Somebody decided where the plaza went and what was permitted in it, somebody arranged the planting and the harvest that fed five hundred mouths, and the rule about where rubbish goes had to hold for decades to leave a ring that regular. Communal ritual and large scale farming are the two activities that plaza was built for.

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.

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.