Istwa Nou

The ceremonial sites of Puerto Rico are built around stone lined courts, and many sites hold several of them. Hispaniola, the next island west, built large circular plazas instead. The two islands are neighbours, their populations were in contact, and they produced different architecture for what looks like a related purpose. The courts hosted ball games and the gatherings, religious and social, that hold a community to a shared idea of itself. Their design and their number suggest Puerto Rican societies were working from ideological foundations of their own rather than a version of Hispaniola's. Architecture is the most expensive thing a society makes and the hardest to change, which is why archaeologists read it as evidence for political structure. Somebody had to summon and feed the labour that lined those courts with stone, and somebody set the calendar of events that filled them. Divergent histories on adjacent islands produced divergent institutions, and the stone is where that divergence is still legible.

L. Antonio Curet and Joshua Torres challenged the habit of describing every pre-Columbian Caribbean society as a Taino chiefdom. The label began as a convenience for sorting sites and hardened into a statement about how those societies were organised. Once hardened it did work of its own, flattening local difference and hiding the particular sequences by which each island arrived at its own arrangements. The evidence points to a mosaic. Political authority, settlement layout, craft production and ritual varied from island to island and within single islands, and communities a day's sail apart managed power in ways that reduce to no single type. Research since has concentrated on local sequences in place of regional labels. The stakes reach past archaeology. The Spanish arrived carrying categories for reading the people they met, decided what a chief was and who held the office, and governed accordingly. A discipline that inherits those categories is still working with an instrument built for conquest.