c. 1200 CE · Indigenousyear only

Taíno society reaches its full form

Chiefdoms, ball courts, a religious system, a working polity. Three centuries before the ships.

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c. 1200 · Indigenousapproximate

Stone ball courts mark the arrival of the chiefdoms

A permanent public work that grows no food is proof somebody could command labour.

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c. 1200 to 1550 · Indigenousspan

A Cuban town keeps working after the Spanish arrive

El Chorro de Maita's layers run past contact, which is where the standard account stops.

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c. 1200 · Indigenousapproximate

Five small islands take up the same decoration at once

Saba, St John, St Croix, St Martin and Anguilla all turn Chicoid within the same span.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Three pottery styles share Puerto Rico and none of them wins

Boca Chica, Capa and Esperanza turn up mixed together, which is what overlapping identity looks like.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Boat shaped bowls, bat faced lugs and bottles for manioc beer

The Boca Chica style is what the word Taino actually rests on: shared icons, shared standard.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Chicoid designs reach Cuba one way and the Lesser Antilles the other

Establishing the distribution is easy. Explaining how a complicated image travelled is not.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Chicoid pots cost more labour and were meant to say so

Thicker walls, polished surfaces, sculpted lugs: the measure of how much slack a society had.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

The jar that holds the beer also holds the politics

Potizas carried water and manioc beer, which puts them at the centre of every gathering.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Swept floors, refuse mounds and graves left open at El Flaco

A settlement running on rules everyone knew, down to where the rubbish went and how long a burial took.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

A round house twenty metres across stood at En Bas Saline

The largest building on the site sat at its centre and the goods on its floor were not ordinary.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

The finest pottery in Haiti was made in Guacanagari's district

Carrier ware carries the modelled faces and burnished surfaces of the Chicoid style at its peak.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

The earthwork at En Bas Saline is 350 metres across and deliberate

Soil was dug from pits along the inside and piled into a ridge that wraps half a plaza.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Hispaniola fills up inland and the bones in the middens change

River fish and land animals replace reef species, and the farming intensifies to match.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

A wall of piled cobbles watches the passage between Cuba and Haiti

The enclosure runs 250 metres by 135 and looks down the channel the canoes had to use.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

A four sided enclosure with rounded corners sits above the same channel

Monte Cristo holds two mounds, one of them inside the walls, and the bush has kept the rest.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

A wall 85 metres long in Cuba is built entirely out of rubbish

The Gran Muro de San Lucas stands 1.8 metres high and is made of midden, not soil or stone.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Cuban farmers moved inland to reach the soil they called red land

El Chorro de Maita and its neighbours sit kilometres from the sea, beside ground that grows manioc.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Lucayan potters had no good clay so they tempered with burnt shell

The Bahamas were settled from Hispaniola and Cuba, and the pots record the move and the shortfall.

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c. 1200 to 1300 · Indigenousspan

A workshop at Governors Beach turns out fifteen hundred scarlet beads

Chama shell holds its colour for centuries, which is precisely why it was worth the drilling.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

A greenstone dog spirit and an agate ear spool were made in Jamaica

The ear spool has a hole down the middle, most likely for feathers that did not survive.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Small shell masks turn up on islands hundreds of kilometres apart

The same stylised faces appear from the Greater Antilles through the northern Lesser Antilles.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

The northern Lesser Antilles stop being villages and become lookouts

Permanent settlements give way to stations spaced along the route, watching who passes.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

The big islands absorb the small ones before Europe arrives at all

Hispaniola and Puerto Rico expand east and west, and local lines of development end.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Southern Cuban villages record the first years of living with Spaniards

Shell tools and early colonial ceramics come out of the same deposits at these sites.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

The Caicos banks fed the Greater Antilles with dried conch

Small islands with poor soil traded meat and shell for pottery and manioc beer.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Cuban mounds held houses, rubbish and the dead as well as crops

Spanish accounts called them agriculture. The excavations found burials and ceremonial gear.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Giving away a shell face was how alliances were paid for

Guaizas moved between polities across the Antilles as tokens of a debt both sides valued.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

In Puerto Rico the shaman was responsible for the harvest

Carved bone and pierced teeth were working equipment for reaching the other world.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

The eastern tip of Hispaniola was farmed and fished at the same time

Meillacoid deposits at Punta Cana show root crops and the reef feeding one settlement.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

Atajadizo built plazas for dancing and ruled the country around it

Mounds, stone collars and Chicoid ware mark the Yuma region as a seat of power.

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c. 1200 to 1500 · Indigenousspan

The Ciboney were neighbours of the Taino, not leftovers from an older age

Stone tool assemblages sit beside Ceramic Age material at sites in Cuba and in Haiti.

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1200 to 1500 · Africanspan

Kwilu speakers name a leader who pays and placates

The word for a lineage head came from a verb meaning to appease and to pay bridewealth.

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1204 · Pre-Revolutionaryyear only

The word slave comes from the people Genoa was selling after 1204

Crusaders take Constantinople, and Italian merchants open buying stations on the Black Sea.

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c. 1220 to 1640 · Indigenousspan

Wood survives at Los Buchillones and four centuries survive with it

A waterlogged Cuban settlement kept its timber, and the occupation runs into the colonial period.

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1297 to 1332 · Africanspan

Kankan Moussa brings poets and historians home from Mecca

A pilgrimage used as a recruiting trip, and two mosques raised by the men he hired.

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