Two Jamaican villages near each other work in different ways

Paradise and Sweetwater lie close together in Jamaica, and their inhabitants used the same Meillacoid pottery, yet their tools have almost nothing in common. Sweetwater is full of bivalve scrapers suited to working swamp resources. Paradise has shell axes and flaked chert. Two neighbouring communities of the same broad culture were doing measurably different work, because the ground under each of them offered different things. This runs against a habit in Caribbean archaeology of treating an island as a single culture area and reading any site on it as representative of the whole. Keegan and Hofman put the difference down to local groups making their own decisions about the terrain and plants they had. That is a claim about agency at a very small scale, the scale of a village choosing how to feed itself. Pre-Columbian Jamaica held a patchwork of specialised local economies, and the uniformity earlier accounts described came from not having dug enough places.

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.

Laurent Dubois opens his history of the Haitian Revolution with the arrival of Columbus on the northern shore of the island on 5 December 1492 and with the name he gave it, La Isla Espanola. Europeans had touched other islands in the preceding weeks and sailed on. This time they stayed, and no year since has passed without a European or a European derived state claiming authority over some part of this ground. The island now carries two countries with different languages, different histories and a shared border running some three hundred and eighty kilometres. Haiti holds the western third and speaks Kreyol and French. The Dominican Republic holds the east and speaks Spanish. Both date from what happened after this landing, and the line between them was drawn later by European powers dividing the island between Spain and France. One afternoon on a beach in December is the common ancestor of two national histories that spend much of their time insisting they are unrelated.

Less than twelve months separate the founding of La Navidad from its destruction. Columbus left the garrison on the north coast of Hispaniola in January 1493, and the Taino of the surrounding country burned the place before the year was out. Geggus is direct about the cause. The Spaniards left there preyed on the people around them, and the people around them answered. That reading matters because of what the standard chronology usually does with the episode, which is to file it under indigenous treachery and move on. The men in the fort had no supply line, no authority over anyone and no restraint. They took food, they took women, and they went looking for gold in country whose owners had agreed to none of it. The response was local, organised and effective. The first act of armed resistance to European settlement anywhere in the Americas happened here, and it worked.