Istwa Nou

Île à Rat is under half a hectare of sand off the north coast of Haiti, sitting at the mouth of the Baie de l'Acul. Its value to archaeology is out of all proportion to its size. The soil is sandy and enriched with humus, which preserved artefacts well, and the cultural debris accumulated in clear layers, one above the next, across several centuries. That means the change from one pottery series to another can be read directly in the ground instead of being inferred by comparing separate sites. The island records the regional shift into Meillacoid and then Chicoid traditions. Its position explains the occupation: a small island in the mouth of a bay guards the entrance and watches everything going in or out. Canoe traffic along this coast was constant, and whoever held the rock at the entrance had a view of it. The smallest landmasses in the Caribbean were rarely empty and rarely unimportant.

At El Flaco in the northwestern Dominican Republic, people levelled the ground for their houses and kept the living areas swept, so thoroughly that the floors are nearly empty of artefacts. Everything went onto earthen mounds around the edges of the settlement, and those mounds are dense with material: Chicoid and Meillacoid pottery together, beads of shell, bone and stone. The mixture of the two ceramic traditions in one place points to a community either drawing on both or living beside people who used the other. Some of the burials suggest a two stage funeral, with the grave left open until the body had dried before the final interment. A settlement that sweeps its floors, keeps its refuse in designated mounds and buries its dead in stages is a settlement running on rules everybody knows. El Flaco supplies the domestic detail that survey archaeology rarely reaches, and the detail describes an ordered daily life.