Istwa Nou

Set a Chicoid sherd beside a Meillacoid one and the differences are physical. Chicoid walls run seven to nine millimetres against four to six, and the fabric is softer. The surface is polished. The range of shapes is wide, taking in effigy figures and bottles finished with a white slip. The incised lines are broad, shallow and widely spaced, and they characteristically end in a punched dot, which is exactly what Meillacoid lines never do. Lugs are modelled into small sculptures instead of being built up from applied strips. The colours run grey to brown. All of this amounts to a different investment of labour: more clay, more finishing, more time per vessel, more skill demanded of the potter. Societies that put that much work into containers have surplus labour and a reason to display it. The pottery of the Late Ceramic Age is the most direct measure available of how much slack these communities had and what they chose to spend it on.

The potiza is a specialised jar of the eastern Dominican Republic and one of the recognisable products of the Chicoid world. It carried water and it stored manioc beer, which places it at the centre of the occasions where people came together: feasts, ceremonies, the gatherings where obligations were acknowledged and rank was performed. Brewing beer from manioc takes time and a quantity of harvested root, and serving it to a crowd takes both a surplus and a host with the standing to call the crowd together. The jars themselves required a potter working at a high level, and they were decorated as well as functional, so the vessel that held the drink also carried the symbols. Archaeologists follow potizas outward from Hispaniola to trace how far Chicoid influence reached. What that map traces is the spread of a way of holding a gathering, which is to say a way of doing politics.