Two pottery traditions share Hispaniola and copy each other

While Meillacoid pottery was spreading through the north, a different tradition appeared in the southeast of the Dominican Republic. Chicoid vessels are also incised, but everything about the execution differs. The incisions are broader and deeper, the designs curve where Meillacoid designs run straight, the surfaces are polished until they shine, and the human faces on the pots are engraved and modelled instead of stuck on. Two ceramic traditions in one island usually gets read as two peoples, one displacing the other. The evidence here says something else. In their early phases Chicoid and Meillacoid communities lived alongside each other, sometimes in settlements paired within sight, and their pottery mixes in the same deposits. Potters on each side borrowed elements from the other. Whatever divided these communities, it did not stop them living as neighbours or copying each other's work, and the boundaries archaeologists draw on maps of Hispaniola were far more porous than the lines suggest.

Ghana began around the year 300 under princes described in Arab accounts as white, and their line held power for about seven centuries before Soninke rulers, who were black, took the throne. The new dynasty pushed its conquests into the desert and subdued Berber populations there. By the year 1000 the Arab geographers al Bakri and al Idrisi were describing a state of real political weight and material wealth. Ghana lived on its position between north and south. It was the depot for salt cut from the mines of Tatental in the Sahara, a substance so scarce in central Africa that it sometimes served as money alongside gold and silver, and it was the great market for gold dust and nuggets carried up from the fields south of the Senegal river. That wealth drew raiders. Abu Bakr ibn Umar, the Almoravid ruler who had taken southern Morocco and the whole Sahara, invaded the empire and destroyed it.

Speakers of Old French inherited a noun, puison, from the Latin word for a drink, and it kept both the senses Latin had carried. A puison could be a medicine and it could kill. Around 1130 they built something new out of it, the verb empoisonner, which meant to kill by poison and carried no other sense. By the end of the thirteenth century they had added a noun for the person who did it. Anglo Norman speakers took the verb across the channel in the fourteenth century, shortened it, and made their own word for the doer. The direction of the change is the evidence. Nobody needed a verb meaning to give medicine. People needed a word for a particular fear, and once the word for the person existed, the person existed as a type. The French colonists who reached the Caribbean four centuries later brought this vocabulary with them and applied it to the enslaved.

The Fourth Crusade took Constantinople in 1204, and merchants from Genoa and Venice used the opening to set up ports on the northern shore of the Black Sea where they could buy people. They kept at it for two and a half centuries. The captives were Armenians, Circassians, Tatars and Bulgarians, and European clerks lumped them together under the loose heading of Slavs, which is where the word slave entered the languages of western Europe. Where those people went matters as much as who they were. A good number were put to work growing and milling sugar on Cyprus and Sicily, an operation that needed gangs of labour under supervision through a fixed season. The plantation with a bound workforce on it was therefore a working European business two centuries before anyone crossed the Atlantic. When it was carried to Madeira, then to Hispaniola, then to Saint-Domingue, nothing about it had to be invented. It had to be enlarged, and the supply had to be found somewhere else.