Istwa Nou

The islands of the northern Caribbean form a chain in which each island can be seen from the next, while none of them can be seen from the South American mainland. Somebody had to sail out of sight of land to find them. Once found they were worth having, with reef and inshore fisheries alongside soil and forest. Keegan and Hofman note the pattern in where the earliest Ceramic Age communities put themselves. Many chose the smaller islands rather than the large land masses of the Greater Antilles, which suggests the first colonists weighed immediate access to resources ahead of long term room to grow. The result was a settled line running through the archipelago along which movement and communication were rarely broken. That is the point which matters for everything after it. The Caribbean was a connected space with routes and neighbours long before Europeans drew a chart of it, and Hispaniola sat inside that network from the beginning.

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.

Archaeologists long assumed that the first settlers of the Caribbean preferred the larger islands, reasoning that a small island holds fewer animals and less ground to farm. The excavated evidence does not support that. Land animals were never a large part of the diet in these islands. The food came from the sea, and many small islands sit on banks more productive than the water around their bigger neighbours. Saba is one of them. A village of this period worked a catchment of about five kilometres around itself, which an island of five square kilometres supplies without difficulty. Once that is understood, the distribution of Early Ceramic Age sites stops being puzzling. Settlements turn up on islands that earlier scholars had dismissed as too small to hold anyone permanently, because the calculation was being made from the land rather than from the water. People who lived by sailing between islands did not measure them the way people who live on continents do.