Istwa Nou

The excavation at Île à Rat off northern Haiti cut through about seventy five centimetres of cultural deposit and found five distinct layers in it. Read from the bottom up they give the sequence for the whole region: the Archaic Age, then Ostionoid, then Meillacoid, then Chicoid, then Spanish contact. Immediately below the surface, in the root zone, lay Spanish pottery. Columbus reached this stretch of coast on 20 December 1492, and the fragments in the top layer are the material trace of that arrival on an island most people have never heard of. Under the Spanish sherds came a dense concentration of Chicoid pottery with the shells of juvenile queen conch. Because the layers do not run into one another, the pottery series can be treated as genuinely distinct traditions succeeding each other rather than as categories imposed by archaeologists on a continuous smear of material. Three quarters of a metre of sand holds several thousand years, and the last few centimetres hold Europe.