Istwa Nou

The earliest Meillacoid settlements in Cuba appear in the region the indigenous population called Bayaquitirí, at the eastern end of the island nearest Hispaniola. For a time the newcomers and the existing Ostionoid communities seem to have lived side by side, and the two can be told apart on the shelf: Ostionoid potters painted their vessels red, Meillacoid potters cut their designs into the clay. Then the red paint goes. Within a short span of the incised style arriving, painted decoration stops appearing in the Cuban record altogether. Something moved westward out of Hispaniola, and the argument among archaeologists is over what. A migration of people, a set of techniques adopted by people already there, or a category imposed by researchers on material that never was one thing. Cuban archaeologists in particular question whether Ostionoid names a real tradition at all. The disappearance of the red paint is beyond dispute. Its meaning is the open question.

Meillacoid sites in Cuba show the same way of living from first settlement through to the arrival of the Spanish, which is several centuries with very little change in it. The middens are full of fish and mollusc remains, so the diet held steady. Marine shell and marine bone turn up at sites well inland, so food and materials were moving between coast and interior on a regular basis rather than occasionally. The tools stay the same as well: the proportions of stone artefacts, shell implements and coral abraders barely shift across the entire sequence. What does change is the quantity of pottery, which grows steadily, and the ordinary reading of that is a rising population. A region getting more crowded with no sign of fortification, weapon caches or burnt layers is a region whose people worked out how to absorb growth. Long stability of this kind is a difficult thing achieved and then maintained.