Istwa Nou

The rubbish at Governors Beach on Grand Turk is mostly fish heads. The species is grunt, caught in numbers that point to basket traps, and the bodies are missing. Fire cracked rock at the site indicates the bodies were smoked on a barbacoa, a wooden rack over a slow fire, and then carried away. The main business here was making beads, and beadworkers have to eat. Feeding a work party on fish heads while the preserved fillets go back to the larger settlements of Hispaniola is a provisioning decision, and it distinguishes this place from Coralie nearby, where the diet looks quite different. The deposits describe an outpost: a specialised production site on a small island, supplied and staffed from a larger island to the south, with its output and even its food shipped back to the centre. The Turks and Caicos were a frontier for the Greater Antilles, worked for what they yielded.

Tiger lucine is a clam whose shell grows in increments that record the season of its death, so a midden full of them will say when in the year the people eating them were present. At Governors Beach on Grand Turk the answer was unambiguous: dry season only. Nobody stayed through the wet months. The archaeological deposits are shallow, which fits a place used briefly and repeatedly instead of lived in. Putting the two facts together gives a picture of people from Hispaniola crossing to the Turks and Caicos in the part of the year when the farming at home did not need them, working the island for what it produced, and going back again. That is scheduling. It requires knowing the calendar of two places at once and moving a work party across open water to fit them together. The small outer islands sat inside the working year of the Greater Antilles, rostered like any other field.

Zooarchaeologists sorting the animal bone from Governors Beach on Grand Turk found it dominated by the heads of grunts, with almost nothing from the rest of the fish. A catch does not arrive headless, so the bodies left the island. Preserving them by smoking or salting and shipping them to the settlements of Hispaniola accounts for the pattern, and it makes this site a processing station rather than a village. Everything else about the place agrees. The occupation is seasonal, the deposits are shallow, and the work done here was specialised. Running such a station means sending people and canoes across open sea, keeping them supplied while they work, and moving preserved food back along the same route. Groups based in the Greater Antilles were operating a maritime territory extending well beyond the islands they lived on, and managing it as a system. The refuse of a fish camp is enough to demonstrate the whole arrangement.

The site at Governors Beach was a bead factory. Excavation recovered more than 1,500 finished beads and 4,400 blanks, all cut from the bright scarlet siphon shells of Chama. The toolkit behind that output was assembled from several sources. Nippers came from the queen conch, Lobatus gigas, platforms of manufactured concrete were used for polishing, and the drill bits were tipped with chert brought in from elsewhere, because a hole through a small shell bead needs a point that will not blunt. The raw material was chosen deliberately. Colour taken from the outer skin of the conch fades quickly, while Chama holds its red for centuries, and a bead that stays bright is a bead worth giving. Production on this scale was not for local use. These were prestige goods made for exchange across the Caribbean, worn to show rank and passed along to hold lineages and alliances together. Somebody in the Turks and Caicos was manufacturing status for export.