Istwa Nou

Across Cuba and Hispaniola the Lithic age tool kit runs on macroblades, long flakes struck from prismatic cores of fine-grained chert and used without further retouching. In Puerto Rico the same technique was applied to chalcedony. At Savanne Carree No. 2 on the Haitian coast, half of the flaked stone recovered is blades. What is absent is the debris. No cores, none of the waste that piles up wherever stone is actually worked. The blanks were made somewhere else, at workshops inland or on another island, and carried to the coast finished. That single absence changes the picture of the period. It means these communities were moving raw material and manufactured goods across distance, by exchange or by organised expeditions to the quarry, and that somebody was keeping track of where good chert came from. Between roughly 4000 and 1000 BCE the Caribbean already had supply lines. Nobody was living off whatever happened to be underfoot.

Radiocarbon dates from stratum IV at the flaked-stone workshop sites in Haiti come out between roughly 1 BCE and 625 CE. The material at these places is blade tools of high quality stone, and blades of that kind are usually taken as the signature of the earliest people to settle the island. The late dates put the two readings in conflict. Either the tool type is a poor marker of first arrival, or the sites went on being worked for many centuries after the first arrival, or both. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show how weak tool typology is as a clock. What the dates do establish is that people kept coming back to the same outcrops for six hundred years, because the stone there was worth the journey. That is detailed regional knowledge, held and handed on across generations, about where the good raw material lies on an island whose history most books only begin to describe in 1492.