We Haitians have always known who we are and where we are going. Every generation sets out for it, and in every generation something interrupts our journey, our walk. Sometimes it comes from outside. Sometimes it comes from among us. Those interruptions are in this chronology because they happened; they're not who we are. We have never been defined by those off-road moments; and we have never internalized them.
Each island produced its own society and the ground still shows it
Settlement across the Greater Antilles met a range of environments and diverged accordingly.
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As people dispersed across the Greater Antilles they encountered a wide range of environments, and the environments pushed back. Local conditions on each island encouraged particular ways of working, particular arrangements for living together, particular habits that hardened into identity. The result was a mosaic, and it is legible today in how sharply the material remains differ from one island to the next. Keegan and Hofman argue that the pre-Columbian Caribbean should be read as a region in constant motion, with communities articulating with one another and expressing themselves regionally over several thousand years. This matters for what comes afterward. The colonial account of indigenous Caribbean life reduces it to a single undifferentiated people awaiting discovery. The archaeology shows dozens of distinct societies with their own trajectories, and the reduction was performed by writers who arrived at the very end and stayed a short time.
Greater AntillesCaribbean
Where this comes fromKeegan, W. F., & Hofman, C. L. (2017). The Caribbean before Columbus. Oxford University Press. p. 43.HT-CBCO-000065
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.
Island communities kept lifelines open to the mainland they came from
Late Archaic exchange with the Isthmo-Colombian region carried goods, people and ideas both ways.
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Late in the Archaic Age the traffic grew heavier between the islands and the Isthmo-Colombian mainland of Central and South America. Goods moved, and so did people and ideas. Keegan and Hofman describe these routes as lifelines running back to the communities the islanders had come from, which is a precise way to put it. A small population scattered across islands needs contact to stay viable, socially and culturally and in the plainest biological sense, and the mainland connection supplied it. The archaeology of the period looks different from one island to the next, and the authors read that variation as people adjusting to the particular place they had landed in. What this era built was the framework the later ceramic age villages would use. The settled farming communities that eventually filled Hispaniola did not appear out of nowhere. They inherited routes, relationships and habits of movement that had been in service for centuries.
Archaic Age islandersCaribbean islandsIsthmo-Colombian regionHispaniola
Where this comes fromKeegan, W. F., & Hofman, C. L. (2017). The Caribbean before Columbus. Oxford University Press. p. 43.HT-CBCO-000065
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.