Istwa Nou

The Ortoiroid series begins in Trinidad and works its way up the Lesser Antilles toward Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands across a long span, from around 3000 BCE to a few centuries before the common era. The Cayo Cofresi complex in eastern Puerto Rico belongs to that series and is marked out by well-formed ground-stone pestles. Those pestles resemble artefacts from Banwari Trace in Trinidad closely enough that the connection is hard to explain any other way. Trinidad sits within sight of the South American mainland, so a chain of resemblances running from there to Puerto Rico traces a route people actually travelled, island by island, with their tool traditions intact. Local complexes along the way show the tradition adapting as it went north, to different stone, different coastlines and different food. The Antilles were a corridor with traffic on it for three thousand years before anyone in Europe had heard of them.

From about 2000 BCE to about 145 CE, sites belonging to the Courian Casimiroid subseries were occupied across Hispaniola, and archaeologists have identified them on the northern and the southern coast of present-day Haiti, at Fort Liberte and on Ile a Vache among other places. The long stone blade identifies them. Macroblade production, inherited from the older Lithic Age traditions of the island, carried on here for twenty centuries, and alongside it the tool kit widened to take in a greater range of ground stone. This is the framework archaeologists use to track pre-ceramic society in the Greater Antilles, and it covers a stretch of time four times longer than everything that has happened on the island since 1492. People were living at Fort Liberte, working stone and eating off that coast, for two thousand years before anyone in Europe knew the island was there.

The Krum Bay complex on St Thomas gives the fullest picture available of Archaic Age material life in the Virgin Islands. The deposits hold flaked igneous stone, hammer stones made from pebbles, beads cut from shell, and red ochre, which had a symbolic use or a practical one and possibly both. The marine component is the striking part. Files made from coral, and tips taken from the columella of Lobatus, the central pillar of the conch shell, show people turning the reef itself into a set of tools for working other materials. Archaeologists reading the variation between Krum Bay and neighbouring complexes suspect they are looking at one subsistence and settlement system with different tasks carried out in different places. Early maritime hunters and gatherers in these islands worked several island niches at once, with a tool kit assembled for each, two thousand years before the ceramic villages arrived.