Istwa Nou

The Archaic age inhabitants of the Greater Antilles left a distinctive kit. It combines flaked stone, struck to an edge, with ground stone shaped by abrasion into heavier working tools. Barrera-Mordan in the Dominican Republic is one of the sites where that combination is clearest, and it shows people who had settled into a structured way of living rather than passing through. They had adapted to the environments of large tropical islands, which takes some learning. For a long time the Caribbean was written up as a late-settled region, a backwater at the edge of the American story where people arrived shortly before Europeans did. Assemblages like this one dismantle that. Human beings were present in the northern islands around 4000 BCE, organised enough to leave recognisable technological traditions, and those traditions differ from island to island in ways that let archaeologists follow them. The islands were a settled world with a history of their own long before anyone drew them on a chart.

Excavations at the Corinthia III site in Cuba turned up some of the earliest known Archaic Age pottery in the Caribbean. The find matters because the standard scheme awards pottery to the Ceramic Age migrations that arrived later out of South America, with Archaic peoples cast as foragers who did without it. The Cuban vessels show people working clay well before those migrations reached the island, alongside a move towards more settled living in the Late Archaic. Keegan and Hofman use the case against the period boundaries themselves. Archaeological ages are labels applied afterwards by researchers dividing up a continuum, and the material keeps crossing the lines drawn for it. What the Corinthia III pottery records is a wide range of practice across the archipelago, with communities inventing and adopting at their own pace. The people of the islands were doing their own experimenting, on their own schedule, for centuries before anyone brought them anything.