Istwa Nou

From about 800 BCE Arawak speaking communities from the South American mainland began moving into the Caribbean islands. Their arrival marks a break in island history. Archaeologists identify these colonists as Saladoid, a label taken from their pottery, which they made and decorated in a shared and recognisable style across enormous distances. The migration into the islands was the last stage of something much larger. The movement had begun in the upper Amazon and had already carried these peoples across most of riverine lowland South America before any of them reached salt water. What they brought to the Antilles was a settled economy resting on farming, with permanent villages and the crops to keep them fed. The islands already had people in them, communities of the Archaic Age who lived by fishing, gathering and hunting. The next several centuries in the Caribbean are the story of what those two ways of living did to each other, and Hispaniola was one of the places it happened.

The move into the Early Ceramic Age in the Antilles involved fitting mainland farming to island conditions. The Saladoid colonists arrived with established agricultural technique and paired it with heavy use of the sea, taking fish, shellfish and reef species in quantity. The combination is what made permanent villages possible. Gardens carry a settlement through the year and the reef carries it through a bad harvest, and a community holding both can stay in one place for generations. Those villages kept their ties to each other through exchange, moving finished objects and raw materials between islands. The pottery of the period, in its Huecan and Cedrosan styles, is the visible record of those connections. Keegan and Hofman read the era as the first real pulse of regional integration in the Caribbean, the point at which separate islands began behaving like a single social world. Everything that happens in the archipelago afterwards happens inside a space that was already connected.