Istwa Nou

Trinidad stayed joined to the South American mainland until the Holocene, and the consequences are still visible in what lives there. Its plants and animals are continental in range, and the island holds a long list of species that never reached the rest of the Antilles. It covers about four thousand eight hundred square kilometres, which makes it the sixth largest in the chain. Most of it is low hills and badly drained lowland, with a rough northern coast as the exception. That combination of position and biological range is why archaeologists routinely call Trinidad the gateway to the Caribbean. It is worth being precise about what the label means. Anything moving out of the Orinoco country and into the island chain had to come this way, so the settlement history of every island downstream begins with what people were doing here. A Caribbean that starts in 1492 skips the door and describes only the room.

Windward and Leeward are administrative terms European powers applied to the Lesser Antilles in the seventeenth century, and the boundary between them was drawn to suit shipping and colonial jurisdiction. Colonial usage puts the divide at Dominica. Many archaeologists put it at Guadeloupe and count northward from there. The disagreement is small and it exposes something larger. These names were never meant to describe how the islands were inhabited before Europeans arrived, and the societies living there were organised around canoe routes, marriage, exchange and language, none of which respect a line drawn for administrative convenience. Using the colonial vocabulary makes island groups look separate and fixed where the evidence shows movement and mixing along the whole chain. Keegan and Hofman argue for an archipelagic view instead, treating the sea as the thing that joined people rather than the thing that divided them. The map you are handed decides in advance what you can see.