Istwa Nou

Yams enter Caribbean farming late and change more than the menu. A yam is a root crop that keeps, and a crop that keeps can be counted, stored and handed out. In parts of the Pacific this produced a visible politics: the yam house, a shed of stored roots standing where everyone could see it, was the measure of a leader's capacity to gather a surplus and redistribute it. No yam shed has been excavated in the Caribbean, and Keegan and Hofman claim none. What the islands do show is mounded cultivation, the heaping of soil into raised beds, which takes sustained coordinated labour and returns yields well beyond the needs of the household that worked the field. Somebody organised that labour and somebody allocated what it produced. The chiefdoms the Spanish encountered in the Greater Antilles rested on this arrangement, which is to say that the political structures of 1492 had been grown in the ground over the preceding centuries.

In Puerto Rico the Late Ceramic Age brings three named pottery styles, Boca Chica, Capá and Esperanza, each an elaboration of what came before. The vessels are modelled, incised and punched in combinations far more complex than earlier wares, and archaeologists associate that elaboration with the emerging cultural identity later called Taíno. The interesting part is what failed to happen. New styles did not sweep the old ones away; the assemblages are mixed, with several traditions in use at once in the same places. A single island supported a variety of overlapping identities, and the potters of one village might work in a manner their neighbours had abandoned or never taken up. Read carefully, the ceramics describe local autonomy inside a region growing more complex and more connected. The Taíno of the textbooks, uniform and undifferentiated, is a simplification the pottery of Puerto Rico refuses to support.

Irving Rouse spent four decades building the framework that Caribbean archaeology still argues with. On his model the Boca Chica pottery style began in the southern Dominican Republic and reached Puerto Rico with Chican potters who set up colonies on the southern coast, and local groups there developed the Capa and Esperanza styles under that influence. Influence in this account runs one way, from a source to a periphery, and the resulting style zones become the boundaries of indigenous provinces on the map. Later work reads the same pottery differently. The styles look like the product of traffic in both directions across the Mona Passage, where people, goods and marriages moved between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico for centuries. The dispute is about method as much as about pots. A decorated vessel records what a potter had seen and whose work she admired, and turning that into a claim about which people lived where, and who counted as whom, is a longer leap than the evidence supports.