c. 1200 to 1550 · Indigenousspan
A Cuban town keeps working after the Spanish arrive
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El Chorro de Maíta in eastern Cuba was a centre of the late indigenous Caribbean, occupied through the period when island societies reached their greatest scale and complexity. This is the era of the cacicazgos, chiefdoms large enough to hold many villages under one authority, to collect and redistribute food, and to conduct relations with other chiefdoms. Material at the site carries Chicoid influence, meaning that objects and the ideas attached to them were circulating across the Greater Antilles and being adopted far from where they were made. What makes El Chorro de Maíta particularly useful is that it kept going after the Spanish arrived. The layers run past contact, so the site records indigenous social arrangements still functioning during the first decades of colonisation. The standard account gives the Caribbean an abrupt full stop in 1492. The ground under this village records something slower and more stubborn.
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