Seventy five centimetres of sand hold five ages of the Caribbean

The excavation at Île à Rat off northern Haiti cut through about seventy five centimetres of cultural deposit and found five distinct layers in it. Read from the bottom up they give the sequence for the whole region: the Archaic Age, then Ostionoid, then Meillacoid, then Chicoid, then Spanish contact. Immediately below the surface, in the root zone, lay Spanish pottery. Columbus reached this stretch of coast on 20 December 1492, and the fragments in the top layer are the material trace of that arrival on an island most people have never heard of. Under the Spanish sherds came a dense concentration of Chicoid pottery with the shells of juvenile queen conch. Because the layers do not run into one another, the pottery series can be treated as genuinely distinct traditions succeeding each other rather than as categories imposed by archaeologists on a continuous smear of material. Three quarters of a metre of sand holds several thousand years, and the last few centimetres hold Europe.

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.

Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas on 7 June 1494. It ran a meridian down the Atlantic and awarded everything found west of the line to Spain and everything east of it to Portugal. The pope had already blessed the principle. Between them the two crowns assigned themselves Africa, Asia and the Americas, which is to say most of the inhabited world and nearly all of the people in it. Nobody living in those places was asked, informed or represented. The assumption underneath the document did the lasting damage. Land held by people who were not Christians counted as available, and the peoples on it counted as an asset attached to the soil. That premise licensed four centuries of conquest, the whole of the Atlantic slave trade, and every legal argument by which a European state later claimed a Caribbean island. When France took the western third of Hispaniola it was working inside a frame two Iberian kings had drawn on paper.

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.