Meillacoid takes the north and moves the villages uphill

By about 900 the Meillacoid tradition had become the dominant pottery of the northern Caribbean, spreading across communities that had previously made quite different things. The vessels themselves are plain: unpolished, decorated with narrow incisions, applied pieces and punched marks, made to be used. What travelled with the style was a way of farming. Meillacoid communities intensified swidden cultivation, clearing and burning plots and working them in rotation, probably with new crops arriving from South America. That shift moved people off the coasts and mangrove edges and up onto hilltops, because the priority had become access to workable soil rather than access to the shore. The sea did not stop mattering. Marine food stayed a large part of the diet, and the villages on the ridges kept sending people down to fish. The picture is of societies converging on a shared set of practices across island boundaries, which is what transculturation looks like in the ground.