Seven radiocarbon dates hold a fishing people in the Virgin Islands

The site at Krum Bay on St Thomas has produced seven radiocarbon dates, and together they establish an Ortoiroid presence in the Virgin Islands running from about 880 to 225 BCE. That is six and a half centuries of occupation in one small bay. These were people who lived off the sea. Fish, shellfish and whatever else the reef and the shallows produced supplied the bulk of what they ate, and their tools and their refuse reflect it. They were also in contact with communities on other islands, taking part in regional exchange that used neutral coastal locations as meeting points. Neutral ground implies negotiation, and negotiation implies parties with reason to trust arrangements they did not make on the spot. Seven dates from one site is a modest quantity of evidence, and what it supports is not modest: an established maritime population in the northern Caribbean, trading across open water, seventeen centuries before Columbus reached the same archipelago.

A Greek commercial handbook of about 340 BC, later wrongly credited to Skylax, placed the island of Cerne twelve days' sail from the Straits of Gibraltar and said no ship could get past it for shallows, mud and weed. Phoenician merchants moored there, pitched tents on the island and ferried goods to the mainland in small boats. They took away hides of deer, lion, leopard and cattle, and the hides and tusks of elephants. The people they dealt with used ivory ornaments and cups, put ivory anklets on their women and ivory decoration on their horses, drove chariots, and made a great deal of wine from vines, which the merchants also carried off. In return came perfume, Egyptian stone, Attic pottery and jars. The tents suggest that the permanent colony Hanno had planted on Cerne was already abandoned. Cerne has never been located.

By about 250 BCE, on the radiocarbon evidence Rouse reviews, the Cedrosan Saladoid migration had reached the northern West Indies. The colonists were selective about where they stopped. They favoured high, mountainous islands, which hold rain, carry rivers and support the luxuriant forest their farming needed. Flat, dry islands were passed over. That preference explains a good deal of later Caribbean settlement, including on Hispaniola, whose mountains and well watered valleys made it one of the most heavily populated islands in the region by 1492. This is farming logic applied to an archipelago by people who had crossed open water to reach it. They knew which land would grow their crops and they chose accordingly, across a chain more than a thousand kilometres long. The indigenous history of Haiti begins with decisions of this kind, taken two thousand years before the Spanish arrived and recorded now in charcoal, potsherds and dates.

Excavations at the Corinthia III site in Cuba turned up some of the earliest known Archaic Age pottery in the Caribbean. The find matters because the standard scheme awards pottery to the Ceramic Age migrations that arrived later out of South America, with Archaic peoples cast as foragers who did without it. The Cuban vessels show people working clay well before those migrations reached the island, alongside a move towards more settled living in the Late Archaic. Keegan and Hofman use the case against the period boundaries themselves. Archaeological ages are labels applied afterwards by researchers dividing up a continuum, and the material keeps crossing the lines drawn for it. What the Corinthia III pottery records is a wide range of practice across the archipelago, with communities inventing and adopting at their own pace. The people of the islands were doing their own experimenting, on their own schedule, for centuries before anyone brought them anything.