Istwa Nou

The Lesser Antilles vary enormously in size, geology and climate, and the communities that settled them took correspondingly different paths. People arrived first in the Archaic Age. Different groups arrived again in the Ceramic Age and settled islands that had already been occupied and left. Across thousands of years these communities worked out distinct ways of feeding themselves and distinct ways of organising themselves, each shaped by the particular island underneath it. What happened to them at the point of European contact is routinely misdescribed, because the account rests on European records written by observers with no training and every incentive to simplify. Keegan and Hofman argue the correction has to come from material culture, from what people made and left behind, read across the long run. The colonial documents describe a few decades. The deposits describe five thousand years, and they describe dozens of societies where the documents see one.