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Before the excavation of Punta Candelero in eastern Puerto Rico, some researchers held that the Huecoid was a variant inside the wider Saladoid tradition, a regional specialisation rather than a separate people. Punta Candelero produced Huecoid material on its own, with no Hacienda Grande pottery associated with it. That isolation is the evidence which counted. While two styles always occur together, either explanation stays available; once one occurs without the other, the case for a distinct tradition becomes hard to refuse. The site established the Huecoid as a cultural horizon of its own in the Caribbean, which means the early Ceramic Age islands held at least two distinct populations arriving and settling alongside each other. Keegan and Hofman treat the finding as a turning point in the debate. The first pottery-making societies of the Antilles were plural from the start, and treating pre-Columbian island people as one undifferentiated group has been unsupportable for decades.

Pottery excavated at sites in Puerto Rico and the islands beside it comes in two styles of the same date, and archaeologists have argued for thirty years about what that means. Irving Rouse and others treated the makers of the Huecoid wares as part of the same cultural stock as their neighbours, holding that a difference in decoration is not a difference in people. Luis Chanlatte Baik argued the opposite, that the pottery and the carved stone ornaments of these sites are distinct enough to mark a tradition with its own origin. The dispute went nowhere for a long time, because the evidence was thin and each side could read the same sherds either way. Excavation with controlled stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating has since settled part of it, mostly by establishing which deposits are genuinely contemporary. Keegan and Hofman use the case to show a limit of their discipline. Ethnic and social boundaries in the ancient Caribbean have to be inferred from what people threw away, and objects move between communities more easily than identities do.

Reniel Rodriguez Ramos worked through the stone tools from La Hueca and Punta Candelero to test whether the Huecoid and the Saladoid were one people or two. The test rests on a property of stone working. Techniques for making lithic tools change slowly and pass from one worker to another by direct instruction, which makes them the most conservative part of Caribbean material culture and a steadier marker of identity than pottery, where styles travel between communities that share nothing else. If the two groups belonged to a single culture, their stone assemblages should look alike. They did not. His results showed production methods holding steady across long stretches of time and differing between the two groups, which supports a picture of the early Ceramic Age Caribbean as several distinct cultures living at the same time in the same islands. Arguments about who the first islanders were have run on pottery for most of a century. This moved them onto harder ground.