Istwa Nou

For centuries after pottery making farmers reached Puerto Rico, the people already living there carried on. Archaeology finds them keeping their own food supply and their own way of making tools while the newcomers, whom archaeologists call Saladoid, settled the same island. The two populations shared the ground for a very long time. What happened next shows in the stone. Close study of flaked and ground tools finds the Archaic Age industry and the later Ostiones industry closely related, which means the working knowledge of the first inhabitants passed into the societies that came after them. Archaeologists call this transculturation, and the plain version of it is that descendants of the first islanders helped build the Ceramic Age. The Caribbean past is usually told as a series of arrivals, each one erasing the last. The evidence from Puerto Rico describes something slower. Two peoples lived alongside each other for generations until the distinction stopped being useful, and the older population left its mark on everything that followed.

Between about 600 and 900 CE the middens of Puerto Rico record a change of diet. Land crabs, which had been a staple, give way to shellfish taken from the sea. Archaeologists once drew the contrast sharply, with Saladoid people eating crabs and Ostiones people eating molluscs, each apparently despising the other's dinner. The shift happens alongside the appearance of Ostiones pottery, which in time replaces the Saladoid wares entirely. An older reading took the new pottery and the new diet together as proof that a new population had arrived. Most archaeologists now treat both as local developments, worked out by the people already living on the island. Diet and pottery changing together in one place over three centuries describes a society adjusting to what its own island offered as the population grew and the easy resources thinned. That is a slower and less dramatic account than invasion, and it is the one the ground supports.

At the Canas site in Puerto Rico the Saladoid and Ostiones layers sit one above the other with a clean line between them, and the early conclusion drawn from that line was that two separate cultures had occupied the site in turn. The difficulty with that reading is that nobody could find anywhere for the second culture to have come from. No source region, no migration route. So the material was examined again, and the current view is that Ostionoid pottery grew out of the Saladoid tradition in the islands themselves, with recent argument pointing to the eastern Dominican Republic and the exchanges taking place there. Other evidence supports continuity. Stone toolmaking runs straight through the transition with no equivalent break. What changed was the pottery, and pottery is the loudest thing in an excavation. The change marks the beginning of a period in which the Greater Antilles broke into regions, each developing a look of its own.