Meillacoid pots are thin, incised, and never end a line in a dot

Meillacoid pottery can be identified by hand. The walls are thin, four to six millimetres, and the paste is granular, firing reddish brown to orange brown. The decoration is cut into the surface with a narrow point while the clay is still soft, which pushes up a small ridge along each line, and that ridge is the signature. The motifs are geometric: crosshatching, oblique parallel lines, straight lines that stop where they stop and never terminate in a punched dot. Faces on the vessels are built by sticking the features on rather than modelling them out of the body of the pot. Handles are strapped on, and the ornamental lugs rise above the rim on opposite sides. This level of detail is not pedantry. Pottery is the main dating tool for a region whose people left no writing, so a sherd the size of a coin can place a site in a century and tie it to a whole network of communities making the same choices.

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.

Columbus was born in Genoa in late October 1451, and he spent years selling a bad calculation to anyone who would listen. His estimate of the earth's circumference was wrong and the Portuguese court knew it was wrong, which is why they turned him down. Spain funded him anyway because the upside on a shortcut to Asia was worth the risk on the math. He never reached Asia and he never accepted that he had not. I keep him on this timeline as a person rather than as an event because the personhood is the point. This was not an inevitable force of history. It was a specific man with a specific error and a specific set of investors, and the four hundred years that followed on this island were the compound interest on that transaction.

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.