c. 1000 to 400 BCE · Indigenousspan

A frontier across Puerto Rico worked as a trading counter for six centuries

Crystals and conical stone pestles crossed a line that separated two entirely different peoples.

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c. 1000 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

Stone working technique crosses the Mona Passage from west to east

Ortoiroid people reach Puerto Rico and begin taking methods from the older population of Hispaniola.

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c. 1000 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

Island communities kept lifelines open to the mainland they came from

Late Archaic exchange with the Isthmo-Colombian region carried goods, people and ideas both ways.

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Before 1000 BCE · Africanapproximate

Language and dates pointed to an origin zone, then the digging confirmed it

Fifteen hundred kilometres of woodland savanna between central Nigeria and the edge of East Africa.

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1000 BCE to 1000 CE · Africanspan

Iron leaves the Great Lakes for the Atlantic by three separate roads

Through the rainforest on the middle Congo, along the Sankuru, and across the savanna to the south.

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1000 BCE to 1000 CE · Africanspan

Two words for sheep trace two routes across the Congo basin

One term travelled from South Sudan to the Atlantic. A second went from the lakes to the Sankuru.

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1000 BCE to 1200 CE · Africanspan

A king's bells could speak a sentence his subjects already knew

Two pitches, two tones, and a set phrase struck out in iron as the mark of authority.

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1000 BCE to 1000 CE · Africanspan

Merchant societies with ranks and rituals made long distance trade safe

A trader carrying goods through rival chiefdoms could claim shelter from members at every stage.

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1000 BCE to 300 CE · Indigenousspan

Mexican crops push farming communities to Ontario and North Dakota

The engine that drove the Bantu expansion was running in North America in the same centuries.

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1000 BCE to 1000 CE · Africanspan

The horse turned West African distance from a barrier into a road

Horses crossed the Sahara from Carthage by the mid first millennium BCE, first as luxury, later as cavalry.

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1000 BCE to 700 CE · Africanspan

Religions with scriptures and missionaries appear along the trade routes

Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and Judaism first, then Christianity, Manicheism, Hinduism.

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1000 BCE to 1500 CE · Africanspan

The trade routes Muslim merchants expanded were already ancient

Historians date global commerce from the seventh century CE. The network was a thousand years older.

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By 1000 BCE · Africanapproximate

Behind the Nok terracottas stood a state that controlled metal

Indirect evidence puts small states in Aïr by 1000 BCE and a strong one in Nok country soon after.

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1000 to 800 BCE · Africanspan

Borrowing a technology means borrowing the words for every part of it

Furnaces dated to the eighth century BCE in Rwanda, and a Bantu iron vocabulary taken wholesale.

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1000 to 700 BCE · Africanspan

Africans south of the Sahara invented iron smelting themselves

Nok, the Chad basin and Rwanda were smelting before there was a Phoenician settlement at Carthage.

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1000 to 500 BCE · Africanspan

The Congo basin built a second African trade network by boat

Rivers as arteries, forest paths as feeders, Batwa carriers bringing ivory, beeswax and honey.

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1000 to 500 BCE · Africanspan

Iron, sheep and the word for sheep travelled the same rivers

Klieman dates Congo basin long distance transport to early in the first millennium BCE.

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1000 to 300 BCE · Africanspan

The roster of first millennium empires leaves out the African ones

Assyria, Persia, Alexander, Maurya, Rome and Han fill the list while Napata and Aksum go missing.

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1000 to 300 BCE · Africanspan

Empires expanded into trade networks other people had built

Assyria took the Levant, Rome took the Mediterranean, Aksum took the producing country itself.

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900 to 700 BCE · Africanspan

The Garamantes joined a trade system they did not start

Two commercial revolutions were centuries old before the Sahara's middlemen became prominent.

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c. 880 to 225 BCE · Indigenousspan

Seven radiocarbon dates hold a fishing people in the Virgin Islands

Krum Bay on St Thomas documents Ortoiroid life off the sea for the better part of seven centuries.

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c. 804 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

Ground sloths still lived in the mountains of Hispaniola around 800 BCE

Archaeology puts them in the Cordillera Central late, with better armed hunters on the same ground.

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c. 800 to 200 BCE · Indigenousspan

Farmers out of the Orinoco reach the islands and bring the villages with them

The Saladoid migration closed a movement that began in the upper Amazon and crossed lowland South America.

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c. 800 to 200 BCE · Indigenousspan

The earliest dated Saladoid sites cluster in the northern islands

Vieques, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, Montserrat, Antigua and St Martin all date early.

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750 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

Kush is filed as a backward imitator of the Egypt it ruled

Its heartland belonged to the Nilo-Saharan world, whose religion recognised one Divinity.

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750 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

Napata read Amun as one more face of a single Divinity

Kings who honoured Egyptian gods were fitting them into an older African theology.

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750 to 663 BCE · Africanspan

Napata ruled a larger empire than Egypt ever governed

Two thousand kilometres of Nile, from the Abbai confluence through most of Egypt.

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750 to 650 BCE · Africanspan

Napatan kings rebuilt Egyptian temples to make their rule stick

Reverence for Amun was administration, conducted in the cultural language of the conquered.

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747 to 656 BCE · Africanspan

The Kushite pharaohs brought Egypt an older southern kingship

Taharqo and his line held both halves of the Nile valley for about ninety years.

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c. 700 BCE · Africanapproximate

Ironworking reaches the eastern Bantu communities by 700 BCE

The Great Lakes were the node through which smelting passed into the wider Bantu world.

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650 BCE to 250 CE · Africanspan

Meroe lost Egypt and stayed a great power for nine centuries

Twelve hundred kilometres of territory and control of the road from the Nile to the Red Sea.

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c. 530 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

The earliest Saladoid dates in the islands come from Martinique

Horizon I dates farmers entering a chain already held by older foraging bands.

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500 to 200 BCE · Indigenousspan

The Saladoid bring farming and zemis into the West Indies

Villages that stayed put, root crops in the ground, and spirits given carved form.

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c. 500 BCE to 625 CE · Indigenousspan

Haitian stone workshops stayed in use for six centuries

Dates from stratum IV run to 625 CE at sites read as the mark of the island's first settlers.

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c. 500 BCE to 540 CE · Indigenousspan

The first island settlers chose small islands over big ones

An intervisible chain, invisible from the mainland, settled for its reefs and its short crossings.

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c. 500 BCE · Africanapproximate

Two separate iron vocabularies collide in eastern South Sudan

One set of words moved east from central Africa, another south from the Ethiopian highlands.

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500 BCE onward · Africanspan

Kings stop monopolising trade and start taxing it

By the mid first millennium BCE the Garamantes had tied West African trade to the Mediterranean.

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500 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

The Horn of Africa is the hinge of the ancient trade web

Networks running from Cornish tin and Baltic amber to India, Indonesia and the East African coast.

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500 BCE to 700 CE · Africanspan

Aksum fought across the Red Sea with African elephants

Frankincense, myrrh, gold and ivory paid for an empire Mani ranked with Rome, Persia and China.

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500 to 146 BCE · Africanspan

The word for horse in Mali came from Carthage

So and siso across the Niger bend derive from Punic, dating the traffic before Rome burned Carthage.

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500s to 400s BCE · Africanspan

West African commerce was running before the Garamantes mattered

The Saharan merchants joined a network two thousand kilometres wide that was already old.

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about 430 BCE · Africanapproximate

Carthaginians buy West African gold without speaking

Goods laid on a beach, smoke raised, gold added until both sides are satisfied.

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c. 400 BCE to 500 CE · Indigenousspan

Pottery and permanent fields mark the Early Ceramic Age

Trants in Montserrat and Hacienda Grande in Puerto Rico set the standard for the period.

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about 340 BCE · Africanapproximate

A Greek handbook lists what Phoenician traders carried to Cerne

Ivory, hides and wine change hands on an Atlantic island nobody has since located.

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300 BCE to 700 CE · Africanspan

Ezana of Aksum became Christian centuries before most of Europe

Religions moved on trade routes, carried by merchants who were selling and preaching at once.

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300 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan

Connected trade routes made the first pandemics possible

One disease zone from the Atlantic to the Pacific, assembled by merchants and their cargo.

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300 to 1 BCE · Africanspan

African smelters make steel two thousand years before Bessemer

Furnaces in the Great Lakes region ran hot enough to take steel straight out of the smelt.

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c. 270 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

Cuban potters were firing clay before the Ceramic Age migrations

Corinthia III yields Archaic Age vessels that break a tidy boundary between two periods.

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c. 270 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

El Convento dates the Huecoid earlier than the eastern sites

At Maisabel, Huecoid pottery lies in a sealed layer under the Saladoid deposits above it.

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c. 250 BCE · Indigenousapproximate

The Saladoid pick high islands with forest and water

Radiocarbon puts them in the northern West Indies, choosing mountains over flat ground.

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c. 200 BCE to 400 CE · Indigenousspan

Saladoid villages lived off gardens and reefs at the same time

Farming carried from the mainland combined with heavy harvesting of Caribbean sea life.

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c. 200 BCE to 200 CE · Indigenousspan

Punta Candelero settles the Huecoid as a culture of its own

Huecoid material found with no Saladoid pottery near it brought a long argument to an end.

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c. 200 BCE to 500 CE · Indigenousspan

Island craftsmen cut amulets from stone the islands do not have

Amethyst, carnelian and jadeite worked into condor figures at La Hueca came from the mainland.

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c. 200 BCE to 600 CE · Indigenousspan

Saladoid villages were egalitarian and still organised big labour

Peter Siegel asks how societies without inherited rank cleared forest and raised shared buildings.

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c. 200 BCE to 600 CE · Indigenousspan

The village plaza was also the cemetery, laid out and kept

Hundreds of burials in a shared centre with almost no graves cutting into one another.

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81 BCE · Caribbeanyear only

Rome outlaws killing by hidden means with poison or sorcery

One Latin word family covered the potent herb, the magic spell and the crime.

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