Istwa Nou

In the eastern Dominican Republic the phase archaeologists call Atajadizo marks the point where Chicoid pottery starts turning up alongside older Ostionoid wares. The pottery is the marker; the change underneath it is agricultural. Communities were moving up the rivers into the interior of the island and planting the terraces along them, which is a heavier commitment than coastal gardening and returns more. Maize is present in the interior by about 1060, growing next to the manioc that had been the staple for centuries. Houses from this phase are large enough to hold thirty or forty people, meaning extended families under one roof rather than scattered household plots. Each of those facts requires the others. More land under cultivation supports larger households, larger households supply the labour that clears and maintains river terraces, and a second staple crop protects the whole arrangement against the failure of the first. This is the shape Hispaniola was taking five hundred years before the Spanish saw it.

The Juanpedro site in the Dominican Republic held something like five hundred people, which makes it a town by the standards of the eleventh century Caribbean. The village was laid out around a cleared central plaza, with the houses standing in a ring facing it. Around the outside ran a bank of accumulated refuse, the calzeda, built up over generations from what each household discarded. That ring is now the best evidence for the layout, since it maps where the houses were long after the houses themselves rotted away. The material in it is dense with animal bone and with Ostionoid pottery. A settlement of this size does not organise itself. Somebody decided where the plaza went and what was permitted in it, somebody arranged the planting and the harvest that fed five hundred mouths, and the rule about where rubbish goes had to hold for decades to leave a ring that regular. Communal ritual and large scale farming are the two activities that plaza was built for.

Archaeology in the northwest of what is now the Dominican Republic has changed what the pottery means. Jorge Ulloa Hung and the teams working with him at El Flaco and nearby settlements kept finding wares that specialists had assigned to separate peoples lying together in one deposit. Meillacoid, Chicoid and Ostionoid vessels were being made and used side by side within a single community. For most of the twentieth century each style was read as the signature of a distinct group, and the map of the island before 1492 was drawn as a set of ethnic blocks pressing on one another. The pots do not support that map. They point to households that traded, married and lived across whatever boundaries the styles are supposed to mark, in a region thick with such contact in the centuries before the Spanish came. Keegan and Hofman call the resulting picture archipelagic: identity on these islands travelled with people and goods across water, and it settled nowhere for long.