1 to 200 CE · Africanspan

The banana and the chicken reach Africa from Borneo

A small Austronesian community traded livestock for crops and left the continent an instrument.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

1 to 300 CE · Africanspan

A whole society sails from Borneo to the East African coast

The language they carried is spoken in Madagascar today and it started in southern Kalimantan.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

1 to 400 CE · Africanspan

The Upemba depression sells iron and salt up the Congo rivers

Then smelters to the south worked out copper on their own and the Copper Belt began.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

1 to 500 CE · Africanspan

The flange welded double bell demands four sheets and two welds

Congo basin smiths were doing sheet metalwork that would test any forge in any century.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 1 to 600 CE · Indigenousspan

Saladoid villages were probably ranked before anyone reached the islands

Descent through the mother and residence with her kin gave mobile people a workable frame.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

1 to 1500 CE · Africanspan

Throwing knives map the reach of Congo basin trade in metal

Multi bladed weapons welded from forged plates spread from Darfur across equatorial Africa.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

100 to 300 CE · Africanspan

West African gold crosses the Sahara by the third century

Mined and panned in the Sudan belt, carried north, later minted into other people's money.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 200 to 400 CE · Indigenousspan

A dog is buried with ceremony at Morel in Guadeloupe

The grave belongs to the Early Ceramic Age and it reports on belief rather than on diet.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 200 to 600 CE · Indigenousspan

Archaic islanders outlast the newcomers and shape what follows

Stone tools in Puerto Rico tie the first inhabitants to societies that arrived centuries after them.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

1 to 300 CE · Africanspan

A whole society crosses the Indian Ocean and becomes Malagasy

Borneo to Madagascar. Not a trade route. A migration of an entire people.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

300s CE onward · Africanspan

In most of Africa iron came first and copper came after

Sabi speaking communities opened the Copper Belt ores centuries after they were already smelting iron.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 300 CE · Africanapproximate

Madagascar is settled by people who had married into Africa

They crossed the Mozambique Channel with African cattle and Asian rice and farmed with both.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

325 CE · Africanyear only

Two Egyptians carry the argument that settles Christian doctrine

Alexander and Athanasius won the case at Nicaea, and Augustine of Hippo did the rest for the Latin church.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 350 to 500 CE · Indigenousspan

Barrancoid pots arrive and the northern islands go their own way

The southern islands kept talking to the mainland while the north began making styles of its own.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 400 to 1000 CE · Indigenousspan

Montserrat makes the beads and St Martin makes the axes

Workshop waste marks out the factory islands, and the finished goods turn up everywhere else.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 400 to 1000 CE · Indigenousspan

A workshop on Vieques cuts jade that came from the mainland

Nephrite, jadeite and amethyst moved through the islands as the currency of standing.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 400 to 1000 CE · Indigenousspan

Trinidad pottery thickens and the Orinoco shows in the decoration

Cedros ware survives at two sites. Palo Seco ware is everywhere, and the population was growing.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 400 to 1000 CE · Indigenousspan

The islanders buried their treasure in the rubbish heap

Carnelian, greenstone, serpentinite and amethyst went into village middens on purpose.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 400 to 1000 CE · Indigenousspan

Each island holds a monopoly and trades on it

Debris identifies who manufactured. Finished goods identify who bought.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 400 to 1000 CE · Indigenousspan

Rare stone was how an ambitious man built a following

Keegan and Hofman read the amethyst and jadeite in the middens as the equipment of competitive leadership.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 400 to 1400 CE · Indigenousspan

A Puerto Rican river valley is read through its animal bones

Food, tools and ritual came out of the same fauna, and the use of it tightened over a thousand years.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 400 to 1000 CE · Indigenousspan

An archaeologist knapped stone himself to learn how St Kitts did it

Walker rebuilt Saladoid tools from local rock to find out what the island's geology allowed.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 400 to 1000 CE · Indigenousspan

Antigua stops looking like everyone else after the Saladoid

Middens and house traces at the Royals site catch a community turning local.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 450 to 500 CE · Indigenousspan

Potters reach the islands off the Venezuelan coast

Aruba, Curacao and Bonaire change hands, and the people already there are pushed aside.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 500 to 900 CE · Indigenousspan

The dead move out of the plaza and into the house

Maisabel and Tibes buried in the open centre. Later households kept their ancestors under the floor.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 500 to 900 CE · Indigenousspan

Saladoid settlers reach the Dominican north coast early

Voss puts stable villages there before the stepping stone model has any business allowing them.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

543 · Africanyear only

A Monophysite mission reaches Nubia first by court intrigue

Theodora holds the rival missionaries in Upper Egypt while her man goes south.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 to 900 CE · Indigenousspan

Puerto Rico turns from land crabs to shellfish from the sea

The change in the midden arrives with Ostiones pottery, and both were worked out at home.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 CE · Indigenousapproximate

The pottery changed at Canas while the stone tools stayed the same

A clean break in the layers looked like two cultures. Everything except the pots argues otherwise.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 to 700 CE · Indigenousspan

One pottery style appears across four island groups at once

Speed like that means people were moving, and the movement ran out of Hispaniola.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 to 1000 CE · Indigenousspan

The first islanders' descendants shaped the culture Europeans met

Archaic stonework, Saladoid pottery and a shellfish diet combined into something new in Puerto Rico.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 to 1200 CE · Indigenousspan

The plaza dead may have been carried home to be buried

One reading makes the central grave an axis of the world. Another makes it a return ticket.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 to 900 CE · Indigenousspan

A woman at Anse a la Gourde is buried in eleven hundred beads

Conch shells, shark teeth, stone axes and pots set over the face of the dead.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 to 900 CE · Indigenousspan

The women at Anse a la Gourde came from other islands

Strontium in the teeth, flint from Antigua, greenstone from St Martin, cemi stone from Anguilla.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 to 1400 CE · Indigenousspan

Guadeloupe stops smashing the top shell and starts cooking it

Rice rat and agouti give way to reef fish while the same molluscs get opened a new way.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 to 1200 CE · Indigenousspan

Head shaping in infancy marked which people you belonged to

Styles varied island by island inside one regional idea of what a head should look like.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 600 to 1200 CE · Indigenousspan

Most people stayed in one valley and a few kept moving

Isotopes separate the locals from the coast to interior travellers who carried the goods.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

620s to the nineteenth century · Africanspan

Africa's first mosque stands at Massawa on the Eritrean coast

From there Islam spread inland for twelve hundred years beside a Christian highland kingdom.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 624 CE · Indigenousapproximate

A flint workshop in western Puerto Rico works through the change

Cerrillo peaked in the Ceramic age on nodules people had been quarrying since the Archaic.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

March to April 651 · Africanmonth known

A treaty fixes an annual delivery of 360 people from Nubia

Arab Egypt and Christian Nubia agree terms that hold, with breaks, for five centuries.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

652 · Africanyear only

Nubia buys its independence with an annual payment of slaves

The Baqt kept Muslim armies out of the Upper Nile and sent people downriver instead.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

around 680 · Africanapproximate

Cattle reach the dry savanna and healing follows the herds

Herero words for treatment describe which animal is killed for which affliction.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

700 to 1500 CE · Africanspan

Europe's sea route captured a trade system Africa already ran

Silk, gold, gunpowder, Aristotle and plague moved on connections built long before 1492.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 800 to 1500 CE · Indigenousspan

Cuban bones record hunger, illness and hard labour

Vento Canosa and Gonzalez read chronic disease and injury out of pre-Columbian skeletons.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 800 to 1400 CE · Indigenousspan

Stripping a whole field at Golden Rock reveals a village plan

Versteeg and Schinkel opened broad areas on St Eustatius and recovered house floors.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 800 to 1200 CE · Indigenousspan

Growing villages on Nevis cut the forest and terrace the slopes

Versteeg and Wilson trace clearance, water control and a move uphill as population rose.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 840 to 1300 CE · Indigenousspan

Farmers push up the rivers of the eastern Dominican Republic

Maize reaches the interior by about 1060 and single houses hold forty people.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 850 to 1309 CE · Indigenousspan

A village of five hundred rings its plaza with its own rubbish

The refuse bank at Juanpedro maps where the houses stood centuries after they rotted.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 860 CE · Indigenousapproximate

The Macady style marks a growing population in northeast Haiti

A distinct way of making pots means a community large enough to hand the craft down.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 to 1500 CE · Indigenousspan

Yams, mounds, and the labour that builds a chief

A root crop that keeps can be counted, stored and handed out, which is where rank starts.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 to 1500 CE · Indigenousspan

Meillacoid pots are thin, incised, and never end a line in a dot

A sherd the size of a coin can place a site in a century and tie it to a network.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 to 1500 CE · Indigenousspan

A half hectare island off northern Haiti keeps the whole sequence

Ile a Rat guards the mouth of the Baie de l'Acul and stacks its centuries in order.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 to 1500 CE · Indigenousspan

Seventy five centimetres of sand hold five ages of the Caribbean

The top layer at Ile a Rat is Spanish pottery, and the coast below it is December 1492.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 CE · Indigenousapproximate

Meillacoid takes the north and moves the villages uphill

A style of pot spreads with a style of farming, and the priority becomes soil over shore.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 to 1200 CE · Indigenousspan

Two pottery traditions share Hispaniola and copy each other

Chicoid and Meillacoid villages stood in paired settlements and mixed in the same deposits.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 to 1300 CE · Indigenousspan

The red paint disappears from eastern Cuba

Incised Meillacoid wares arrive in Bayaquitirí and painted decoration stops being made.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 to 1500 CE · Indigenousspan

Cuban villages keep the same tools for six hundred years

Diet, toolkit and exchange hold steady while the potsherds pile up and the population grows.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 to 1300 CE · Indigenousspan

A Jamaican village builds its toolkit from stone and shell

Bluefields Bay has no bivalve scrapers, and the tools it does have describe its routine.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page

c. 900 to 1500 CE · Indigenousspan

Two Jamaican villages near each other work in different ways

Same pottery, opposite tools: swamp scrapers at Sweetwater, shell axes and chert at Paradise.

›Read the full entryClose

Opening… read it as its own page