c. 1220 to 1640 · Indigenousspan
Wood survives at Los Buchillones and four centuries survive with it
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Almost nothing organic lasts in Caribbean ground. Los Buchillones on the Cuban coast is the exception, a settlement built partly over water where posts, house frames and carved objects were held in the sediment and recovered by digging on land and by diving offshore. Radiocarbon dates put people there across four centuries, running from well before Columbus into the early years of Spanish rule, which makes it one of the few places where a single community can be followed across that break. What came out of it does not sit tidily inside the ceramic categories archaeologists use to sort the region, and the site is cited as evidence that indigenous life in the central Antilles was more various than those categories allow. The point is worth carrying forward. Wherever preservation happens to be good, the picture gets more complicated. The neatness of the standard account is mostly a property of what the soil destroys.
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