Istwa Nou

People reached the Caribbean islands in the fifth millennium BCE, and that is where the human history of the region begins. Far less is known about them than about the later communities who made pottery, and the reason is partly a matter of who did the work and in what language. Most of the primary research on the earliest inhabitants was carried out in Cuba and Hispaniola by local archaeologists working within Latin American Social Archaeology. They published in Spanish and used a theoretical framework unlike the one in use to the north. North American syntheses largely left their findings out, and the resulting picture of how the islands were first settled has been thin and in places out of date. This is worth naming plainly. The gap in the record is a gap in reading, and the people best placed to describe the first settlement of the Caribbean were the ones whose work went uncited.

For roughly two decades after 1958, archaeologists working in the Caribbean sorted the earliest island material into stages taken from North America and from Old World sequences. The schemes of Gordon Willey, Philip Phillips and Irving Rouse became the standard way to name what came out of the ground, and the islands acquired a Lithic age and an Archaic age on that authority. A classification is an argument about what a society was. Categories designed for stone using hunters on a continent make island people look like a rough opening chapter waiting for something better to arrive. Keegan and Hofman note that the rigid schemes survived long after specialists agreed they had stopped working, and that they survived because so few researchers cared about the oldest periods. The Greater Antilles, Haiti among them, are where the newer evidence keeps landing. This is the machinery that lets a timeline of the Caribbean begin in 1492 and call everything before it prehistory.