Istwa Nou

Late in the pre-Columbian sequence, settlement on Hispaniola moved away from the shore and into the interior. The animal bone in the rubbish of those inland sites reflects the shift. Land animals and fish taken from rivers and lakes appear in place of the reef species that fill coastal middens. The diet was reorganised rather than replaced, and the farming that supported it was intensified, which is what a growing population requires. With that comes a settlement pattern of large sites, built mounds and laid out ritual ground, the arrangement archaeologists describe as a galactic polity, in which lesser communities orbit a dominant centre. Control over land, water and labour had passed to chiefs who held the position by inheritance. The island was filling up, and the arrangements people made in order to eat were turning into arrangements about who gives the orders. None of it needed an arrival from outside to set it going.

From about 1300 the northern Caribbean turns Chicoid. The style dominates the pottery over an enormous area, and it arrives alongside earthworks, causeways and built roads that tie settlements into networks a person could walk. Keegan and Hofman raise the possibility that what spread was a religion. Theocratic chiefdoms, in which the same figures direct the fields and address the spirits, would account for a uniform aesthetic taking hold across islands that had no single ruler. The same ceremonial objects and religious symbols turn up from Cuba to Puerto Rico, which supports the reading. This is the period the Spanish walked into. The caciques and cacicazgos their chroniclers describe, the chiefs and the territories they held, correspond closely to what the ground shows for these two centuries. The written account and the archaeology agree for once, and what they agree on is that the society Columbus met had been expanding under its own power for two hundred years.