Istwa Nou

Ostiones pottery does not spread outward from one place at walking pace. It shows up in Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica and the Turks and Caicos at very nearly the same time. That distribution undercuts the standard account, in which the style begins in Puerto Rico and works its way west across the northern Greater Antilles over generations. The speed points to heavy traffic between islands, with people, goods and ideas moving in quantity and the current of influence running from Hispaniola into Puerto Rico. Before this, the northern islands had shared a broad common look in their pottery, a regional veneer laid over local differences. The Ostiones horizon replaced it with something adopted quickly and widely. Fast, simultaneous change across four island groups means the sea between them was busy. It also means the communities involved were paying close attention to each other, which is the condition for the political consolidation that came later in the Greater Antilles.

The Ostionoid societies of Puerto Rico were assembled on the island out of everything already there. They relied more heavily on pottery than their predecessors had, while keeping the stone tool industry of the Archaic Age, and they ate from the sea, with marine molluscs central to the diet. Each of those elements has a different pedigree. The pottery descends from the Saladoid colonists, the stonework from the first inhabitants of the island, the diet from the coast itself. What emerged was a single culture with an identity of its own, formed as the incoming Saladoid population was absorbed into the landscape and its people. Archaeologists call the process transculturation. The practical result is that descendants of the first islanders had a hand in the aesthetics and the technology of everyone who came after them. The societies Columbus met in the Greater Antilles were the product of this long blending, and their variety was built over the preceding thousand years.