The fifteenth century · Pre-Revolutionary

Better ships and a compass let Europe reach the Atlantic islands

Portugal and Spain solve the winds, settle Madeira and the Canaries, and plant sugar there.

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The fifteenth century · Pre-Revolutionary

Sugar reaches Madeira and the Canaries and takes its shape there

The system the Mediterranean had run for generations moves out into the ocean.

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c. 1400 to 1600 · Indigenousspan

MC-6 was run by the Lucayans, not planted there by Hispaniola

Ninety percent of the pottery is local. The other tenth came from the big island by canoe.

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c. 1400 to 1600 · Indigenousspan

The court at MC-6 is level to ten centimetres over thirty one metres

Marl carried up from the salt flat, laid flat, and edged with double rows of limestone.

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c. 1400 to 1600 · Indigenousspan

The southern islands kept talking to the mainland and built a pidgin

A shared trade language ran across communities that colonial writers filed under savagery.

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1400 to 1900 · Africanspan

Four slave trades run at once for five hundred years

Eighteen million exports, against seventy five years of formal colonial rule.

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c. 1430 · Indigenousapproximate

A Jamaican village settled in a swamp and lived off clams

Bivalve shells dominate the deposit and bivalve scrapers dominate the tools.

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c. 1440 to 1460 · Indigenousspan

Two villages on a dry limestone plateau in the last decades before 1492

La Desirade offered little water and rough ground, and people settled it anyway.

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c. 1440 to 1460 · Indigenousspan

A shell from Morne Cybele dates the site to decades before contact

The plateau reaches 275 metres, the site covers 300 square metres, and cliffs keep visitors out.

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c. 1440 to 1460 · Indigenousspan

A survey of La Desirade turned up a second settlement on the heights

Morne Souffleur repeats Morne Cybele closely enough to make the pattern deliberate.

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1440 to 1905 · Africanspan

Benin and Oyo are the two largest kingdoms in Africa

One lasted four and a half centuries, the other five, and both outlived the slave trade.

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