Istwa Nou

At Pueblo Viejo in eastern Cuba people raised a bank of mounded gravel and cobble three metres high and four to five metres thick at the base, closing a space of about 250 metres by 135. It sits on a mesa above the Windward Passage, the channel that separates Cuba from Hispaniola and carried the canoe traffic between them. Building it meant gathering stone, hauling it uphill and holding a workforce to the task long enough to complete the circuit. Nothing on that scale gets done without someone able to direct labour and feed the people doing it. The position carries the other half of the argument. A settlement placed to overlook the crossing between two islands is a settlement concerned with what moves along it. The eastern end of Cuba was a place of consequence in the centuries before 1492, and the reason was the water in front of it.

Monte Cristo lies near the Windward Passage and holds an enclosure unlike its neighbours, a parallelogram with rounded corners roughly 42 metres wide. Survey found two large mounds tied to it, one of them standing on the enclosed ground. Thick vegetation has kept most of the site from proper examination, so what is known comes from the outlines that can still be walked. The plan is regular enough to rule out accident. Somebody set the corners and somebody raised the mounds, and the ordinary business of a village does not produce a shape like that. Enclosures, plazas and built ground appear across eastern Cuba in these centuries, part of a wider Caribbean habit of shaping the land into a statement about how a community was ordered and what it held sacred. A site half swallowed by bush is still the record of a decision. The work of finding out which decision has not been done.

The Cuban site called Big Wall takes its name from the Gran Muro de San Lucas, a straight earthwork about 1.8 metres high running 85 metres across the ground. The material is what sets it apart. It was raised from midden, the shell, bone, ash and broken pottery a village discards, rather than from quarried soil or stone. Low round mounds sit at either end and probably carried buildings, houses or something more specialised. Most monumental ground in the Caribbean encloses a plaza. This one runs in a line, which marks a different idea about how to divide space and where a settlement stops. The choice of material carries its own argument. The refuse of daily living was gathered up and made into a permanent public structure, so the leavings of the household became the fabric of the thing everyone could see. The division between domestic and monumental was not one these builders observed.

In the Cuban province of Maniabon, villages sit several kilometres from the coast, next to the fertile ground people there still call tierras rojas, the red lands. El Chorro de Maita is the best known of them. Houses went on hillsides, high enough to stay clear of flooding and close enough to work the fields below. What made the inland ground worth the move was the conuco, the raised mound of worked soil that Caribbean farmers heaped up and planted, which yields far more manioc and maize than scratch cultivation on thin coastal dirt. Distance from the shore did not mean turning away from the sea. Trails ran back to the coast and the fishing and the shell beds stayed in use. The pattern is a considered one. Farmers went where the soil was, kept their houses out of the water, and held onto the coast by walking to it.

Eastern Cuba carries a great deal of built ground, straight earthworks and raised mounds that Cubans call monticulos. Early Spanish observers took the mounds for farming, the heaped beds in which manioc and other crops were grown, and that reading stuck for centuries. Excavation has since found them doing several jobs at once. Some carried houses, some accumulated as refuse deposits, and some held burials. At sites worked by the archaeologist M. R. Harrington the mounds occur alongside Chicoid pottery and the carved spatulas used to induce vomiting before ceremony, which are the possessions of people with rank and ritual duties. A landscape shaped this thoroughly belongs to communities that were growing and had to decide how to arrange themselves on the ground. It also shows what happens when the first written description of a place is made by a man who has been there a few weeks.

Pueblo Viejo occupies a flat hilltop in eastern Cuba, 250 metres above the sea, with steep cliffs doing most of the defensive work. Where the cliffs stop, a bank of earth and stone three metres high closes the gap, and the wall encloses roughly 3.4 hectares. Inside stand at least forty earthen mounds that carried houses. A settlement placed this high, this hard to approach and this thoroughly walled is answering a problem. It might be a stronghold, or a ceremonial precinct kept apart from ordinary ground, or both at once, and archaeologists have argued each case. Either reading points at the same background condition. Somewhere in the two centuries before the Spanish arrived, the eastern end of Cuba held enough tension, or enough consolidating power, for a community to spend that much labour on height and enclosure. People do not carry stone up a hill for no reason.