Istwa Nou

El Chorro de Maita in Cuba is a large village of the late pre-Columbian centuries, its houses raised on mounds around a central plaza. The graves show a society with ranks in it. Some of the dead were buried with guanin, the gold and copper alloy that carried the highest prestige in the islands, and some with objects of brass and tin that could only have come from Europe. The settlement did not end at the conquest. It was turned into an encomienda, the arrangement by which the Spanish crown assigned indigenous people to a colonist together with the right to their labour, and the population was concentrated there. That is what makes the burials worth attention. People living under that system went on interring their dead the way their grandparents had, using metal obtained from the men who had taken the island. The old practice and the new material lie in the same grave.