Istwa Nou

Archaeologists have generally described Saladoid communities as egalitarian, organised in small autonomous villages where leadership was temporary or rested on personal standing rather than inherited rank. The material culture makes that description harder than it sounds. These were people producing elaborate pottery and carved ornament, running exchange networks across hundreds of kilometres of open sea, and clearing forest for agriculture on a scale that needs many hands working at once. Peter Siegel has examined how such groups managed communal labour, the land clearance and the building of large shared structures, without the coercive authority that usually gets the credit for organised work. The question travels well beyond the Caribbean. It asks whether hierarchy is required in order to build things, and the answer these villages return is that it is not. Understanding how they coordinated is also the only way to explain how scattered communities colonised and held together a maritime region two thousand kilometres long.

From about 350 CE the pottery of the eastern Caribbean starts carrying Barrancoid traits, a style out of South America, alongside and then in place of the older Saladoid wares. The traits arrive as a set, which tells archaeologists that contact with the mainland was continuing and mattered enough to change what island potters made. The effect was uneven. In the southern islands, nearest the continent, the mainland influence is strong. In the northern Caribbean, over the same stretch of time, local styles begin to pull away and look like themselves. That divergence marks the point at which island populations, now larger and more numerous, had less need of the South American country their ancestors had left. Ceramic series are the main instrument available for reading any of this, since these societies left no writing. Watching decoration change from island to island and generation to generation is how the shape of social and political networks across the archipelago gets reconstructed at all.