Istwa Nou

The flaked-stone complexes of the Greater Antilles are the best documented part of the early record, largely because struck stone survives well and is easy to recognise. The Archaic age is defined by something wider. Its assemblages carry ground stone and shell in quantity, including conical pestles, stone balls and axes of several types, all of them tools for processing rather than cutting. Barrera-Mordan in the Dominican Republic supplies the baseline collection. A pestle is evidence about food. It means seeds, roots and nuts were being pounded into something edible, which is a different subsistence strategy from hunting and shellfish gathering on their own. The shift in emphasis from flaked tools toward a varied ground-stone inventory tracks a broadening of what people ate and how they got it. Archaeologists also use the differences between these kits to separate one migration from another and to tell an incoming tradition from a local development. The kit is the identity card.