Istwa Nou

At Morel, on the coast of Guadeloupe, excavators found a dog laid in the ground with the care usually given to a person. The burial belongs to the Early Ceramic Age, the first centuries in which pottery making farmers occupied the Lesser Antilles. Nobody spends labour arranging an animal in a grave unless the animal means something, so the find is evidence about what these households believed. The dog may have been a companion, a working partner, or a figure with standing in the spirit world, and possibly all three at once. The practice sits inside the wider Saladoid world, whose people are already known for careful burial rites and for objects made to be used in ceremony. Very little survives of what the first islanders thought. Pottery and stone tools report what they made. A grave dug for a dog reports what they valued, and it is one of the few openings into the cosmology of people living in these islands more than a thousand years before Columbus.