Istwa Nou

MC-6 sits on Middle Caicos beside a salina, a flat that floods with the season. Nine tenths of the pottery there is Palmetto Ware, made locally from the poor clays of the islands. The remaining tenth is Chicoid, high status vessels and the specialised bottles used for manioc beer, brought north from Hispaniola. The setting appears to have been chosen for access. When the water rose, canoes could be paddled in close to the middle of the village, which is a considerable advantage for a place that lives by moving goods. For years the site was read as an outpost planted by Taino from the Greater Antilles in order to work the small islands from outside. That reading has been given up. MC-6 was a Lucayan settlement, run by the people of the Caicos, trading upward into the bigger islands on their own account. Who owns the warehouse is the difference between a colony and a partner.

The centre of MC-6 on Middle Caicos is a court about 31 metres long, lined along its northern and southern edges with double rows of undressed limestone set into earthen ridges. The surface is the remarkable part. It was levelled with marl brought up from the nearby salina and finished so carefully that the fall across the whole length comes to ten centimetres. Getting a surface that flat without instruments means checking it over and over, adding and taking away, and having enough people willing to stay at the job. The court is the focus of a wider plaza defined by ridges of midden and by pits lined with stone. Somebody wanted a large flat open space at the middle of this settlement badly enough to import the material for it. What went on there, dancing, ball play, judgement, assembly, is not recorded. That it mattered is not in doubt, because nobody carries that much marl for a place they mean to walk past.