A half hectare island off northern Haiti keeps the whole sequence

Île à Rat is under half a hectare of sand off the north coast of Haiti, sitting at the mouth of the Baie de l'Acul. Its value to archaeology is out of all proportion to its size. The soil is sandy and enriched with humus, which preserved artefacts well, and the cultural debris accumulated in clear layers, one above the next, across several centuries. That means the change from one pottery series to another can be read directly in the ground instead of being inferred by comparing separate sites. The island records the regional shift into Meillacoid and then Chicoid traditions. Its position explains the occupation: a small island in the mouth of a bay guards the entrance and watches everything going in or out. Canoe traffic along this coast was constant, and whoever held the rock at the entrance had a view of it. The smallest landmasses in the Caribbean were rarely empty and rarely unimportant.

In April 1482 a Portuguese squadron under Diogo Cao was working its way south along the African coast in search of a sea road to India when it came on the mouth of a very large river. Cao took his ships in and landed at Mpinda, the chief port of the kingdom of Kongo. People of the coastal province of Soyo told him that the ruler of the country lived far inland, at Mbandza Kongo. Cao belonged to the Order of Christ, the Portuguese crusading order that Prince Henry the Navigator had directed and that paid for these voyages. Travelling inland the Portuguese found six provinces, well watered farmland, cattle herds, cloth woven locally, streets lined with orange and lemon and pomegranate trees, and a royal court whose ceremony they compared with their own. This meeting opened three centuries of traffic between Portugal and Kongo. The same coast later supplied a large share of the people shipped to Saint-Domingue, the colony that became Haiti.

On the night of 24 December 1492 the Santa Maria drifted onto a reef off the northern coast of Hispaniola, near what is now Cap-Haitien. A ship's boy had the helm. The hull opened and could not be saved. Columbus was left with one seaworthy vessel, since the Pinta had gone off on its own some weeks earlier, and the Nina was too small to carry every man back to Spain. He decided to build a fort out of the wreck and leave part of the crew in it. This accident produced the first European settlement in the Americas, and it produced it on the coast of what is now Haiti. Nothing about the site had been chosen. Rouse notes the practical consequence for the return voyage. Columbus sailed for Spain in January with a crew cut down to what one caravel could hold, and with a garrison behind him that he expected to find alive.

When Columbus arrived in 1492 the island was divided among five Taino chiefdoms, each under a leader called a cacique. Jaragua in the south and Marien in the north cover most of what is now Haiti. Higuey, Magua and Maguana occupied the eastern two thirds, roughly the territory of the Dominican Republic. These were more than villages. Each chiefdom held many settlements, collected tribute, organised labour for planting and building, and conducted relations with its neighbours. Succession was matrilineal. When a cacique died, authority passed to the eldest child of his eldest sister, so a woman's line carried political legitimacy and women themselves could and did rule, as Anacaona of Jaragua did. Spanish administration had no place for any of this and set about replacing it within a decade. The island had a political geography before 1492, with borders, capitals and rules of inheritance. What arrived in December of that year was one system of power destroying another.