c. 1200 · Indigenousapproximate
Five small islands take up the same decoration at once
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Around 1200 the potters of Saba began decorating their vessels in the Chicoid manner, a style whose heartland lay in Hispaniola several hundred kilometres to the west. The same influence appears at the same time on St John, St Croix, St Martin and Anguilla. Five small islands, separated from each other and from Hispaniola by open water, took up a shared visual language. Pottery decoration is one of the ways a community states what it belongs to, and this change means the northern Lesser Antilles were participating in something centred elsewhere and were content to show it. Archaeologists use the pattern to define the Eastern Taíno sphere, a zone of sustained interaction rather than a political unit. The picture of small islands developing in isolation, each community working out its own answers alone, cannot survive this evidence. These places were in constant conversation, and the conversation moved along the same canoe routes that carried food, stone and people.
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