Istwa Nou

The pottery lifted from En Bas Saline belongs overwhelmingly to the Carrier style, the most worked and most finished version of the Chicoid tradition anywhere in Haiti. The vessels carry modelled faces and figures applied at the rim, called adornos, along with dense incised patterns and burnished surfaces. Most of it came out of the largest buildings on the site, which puts it in the hands of people who held rank and used it in ceremony rather than for cooking. Archaeologists use the spread of this style to draw the boundaries of Marien, the chiefdom Guacanagari ruled when the Spanish reached this coast in 1492. That gives the northern shore of Hispaniola a defined political territory with a material signature, mapped from the ground rather than inferred from the writing of the men who ended it. The pots were made here. So was the authority they served.

En Bas Saline sits about a kilometre inland from Limonade Bord de Mer on the north coast of Haiti. Researchers including Kathleen Deagan have identified it as the village of the cacique Guacanagari and as the ground on which La Navidad stood. The case is circumstantial and rests on several strands at once. The site is unusually large and laid out in the pattern of a chief's town. It holds European objects, among them metal aglets, the small tips laced onto Spanish clothing, and bones of animals that were never native to the islands. Its distance from the shore matches contemporary descriptions of where the Santa Maria went aground. The mixture is what makes the place valuable. European material appears inside a Taino village that was still running as a Taino village, so the first weeks of contact can be read in the ground and not only in the admiral's journal. Keegan and Hofman call it a bridge between the pre-Columbian and colonial worlds.

William Hodges was a medical missionary at Limbe who dug in northern Haiti on his own time. He located En Bas Saline, a large settlement site near the north coast, and professionals took it up after him. Kathleen Deagan directed the excavations that followed, using electromagnetic conductivity survey, systematic surface collection and test pits laid out on a grid. The work produced a detailed topographic map of the village and identified features within it, among them residential mounds and a structure resembling a well. The object was to test the written record of Columbus's first voyage against material evidence, since the Spanish account of the settlement at La Navidad and of the Taino town beside it had stood unchecked for centuries. En Bas Saline is among the most important archaeological sites in the Caribbean, and it was found because an amateur living nearby paid attention. Professional archaeology in Haiti has never been funded to do that work on its own.