Istwa Nou

By about 900 the Meillacoid tradition had become the dominant pottery of the northern Caribbean, spreading across communities that had previously made quite different things. The vessels themselves are plain: unpolished, decorated with narrow incisions, applied pieces and punched marks, made to be used. What travelled with the style was a way of farming. Meillacoid communities intensified swidden cultivation, clearing and burning plots and working them in rotation, probably with new crops arriving from South America. That shift moved people off the coasts and mangrove edges and up onto hilltops, because the priority had become access to workable soil rather than access to the shore. The sea did not stop mattering. Marine food stayed a large part of the diet, and the villages on the ridges kept sending people down to fish. The picture is of societies converging on a shared set of practices across island boundaries, which is what transculturation looks like in the ground.

While Meillacoid pottery was spreading through the north, a different tradition appeared in the southeast of the Dominican Republic. Chicoid vessels are also incised, but everything about the execution differs. The incisions are broader and deeper, the designs curve where Meillacoid designs run straight, the surfaces are polished until they shine, and the human faces on the pots are engraved and modelled instead of stuck on. Two ceramic traditions in one island usually gets read as two peoples, one displacing the other. The evidence here says something else. In their early phases Chicoid and Meillacoid communities lived alongside each other, sometimes in settlements paired within sight, and their pottery mixes in the same deposits. Potters on each side borrowed elements from the other. Whatever divided these communities, it did not stop them living as neighbours or copying each other's work, and the boundaries archaeologists draw on maps of Hispaniola were far more porous than the lines suggest.

A ridge of earth curves around the settlement at En Bas Saline in a rough C, roughly 350 metres on one axis and 270 on the other, wrapping halfway around an open plaza. Ridges like this were long read as rubbish, the slow build up of a village throwing its waste outward. The pits on the inner face settle the question here. Soil was dug from them and carried to the ridge, which means the shape was intended and the labour was organised. Electromagnetic survey later showed that more of the village lay under the surface than could be seen on it. Village plans of this kind repeat across Hispaniola, so what happened at En Bas Saline was standard practice rather than local eccentricity. Someone decided where the plaza would sit, how far the ring would run, and who would move the dirt. That is planning, and it was going on here three centuries before Columbus.