Istwa Nou

Sites in Haiti have produced lithic workshops given over to making large flaked-stone blades, with concentrations in the Casimira and Las Alejandrinas areas. The output is specialised. These are a standard product turned out in numbers at a place chosen for its stone, rather than general-purpose flakes struck as the need arose. Marcio Veloz Maggiolo and Jose Cruxent were among the first to document the complexes, and the size and frequency of the blades became the main indicator archaeologists use when dating preceramic sites in the region. Making blades in bulk at a quarry implies mobility, since the people using them lived elsewhere and moved between the source and the coast. It also puts Haiti near the centre of the question of how human beings first spread into the Greater Antilles, because these workshops are among the best evidence for how that expansion was supplied. Around 3000 BCE this island was producing tools for a wider region.

Gus Pantel re-excavated several important stone tool sites in the Caribbean in 1975 and 1976, meaning to describe their assemblages properly. He found that large blades became more common the deeper he dug, which implies that toolmaking changed over time. He also found that saying when was close to impossible. Modern building and erosion had disturbed many of the deposits, so the layers no longer sat in the order they were laid down. At some sites stone tools turned up together with pottery, which is awkward, because Caribbean archaeology had split the islands' past into an Archaic age of stone and a Ceramic age of pots. Mixed deposits mean either that the two overlapped or that the ground has been churned, and often there is no way to decide between them. Pantel's report is still cited for that problem. The tidy sequences printed in textbooks rest on fewer undisturbed sites than most readers assume.