Istwa Nou

The early Archaic age sites on Antigua cluster along the northeast shore and at Flinty Bay, beside quarries of high-quality flint. That coast is a poor place to farm. Trade winds blow across it steadily and carry salt inland, which suppresses plant growth, so the choice of location was about the stone under the ground rather than the soil on top of it. Flint from these quarries has been identified at every other early Archaic site found in the northern Lesser Antilles. The knapping done at the sites themselves is described as expedient, meaning flakes struck off as required rather than the deliberate blade production practised in the Greater Antilles. Two facts sit together here. People were making rough tools on the spot and simultaneously supplying a raw material that travelled across a whole island group. Antiguan flint between roughly 3000 and 2000 BCE is one of the clearest measures of how far these communities moved by sea.

Settlement in the early Archaic Lesser Antilles was split between two kinds of place. There were domestic sites, chosen for water, shelter and food, and there were resource outposts, chosen for what could be taken out of them. The best flint on Antigua came from ground that was no good to live on, which forced a rhythm of movement between the two. That flint reaches virtually every contemporary site in the northern part of the chain. Keegan and Hofman treat it as a lifeline holding a scattered population together, and they insist the arrangement was designed. The first islanders had worked out the geology and the ecology of the archipelago in enough detail to know which island held what, and they built a mobile and flexible social system around that knowledge. Reaching these islands took navigation. Staying in them took an economy, and the economy ran on a rock quarried at a place nobody could inhabit.

Jolly Beach sits on the west coast of Antigua, looking out over reefs and a productive stretch of shallow sea. Around 2000 BCE the people there were making sophisticated flint blades, which sets the site apart from the general run of early stone working in the islands. Their diet was wide. They took eight major species of mollusc, fish from shallow water, sea turtles and manatees. They also took far more land animals than the other coastal sites on Antigua from the same period, and that is the second thing marking Jolly Beach out. Better stone technology and a broader food base together suggest a place people used for longer stretches, or for more purposes, than the camps around it. Two settlements on one small island, a short walk apart, could run on different economies. Archaic populations in the Caribbean read the ground in front of them and adapted site by site.

Paradise and Sweetwater lie close together in Jamaica, and their inhabitants used the same Meillacoid pottery, yet their tools have almost nothing in common. Sweetwater is full of bivalve scrapers suited to working swamp resources. Paradise has shell axes and flaked chert. Two neighbouring communities of the same broad culture were doing measurably different work, because the ground under each of them offered different things. This runs against a habit in Caribbean archaeology of treating an island as a single culture area and reading any site on it as representative of the whole. Keegan and Hofman put the difference down to local groups making their own decisions about the terrain and plants they had. That is a claim about agency at a very small scale, the scale of a village choosing how to feed itself. Pre-Columbian Jamaica held a patchwork of specialised local economies, and the uniformity earlier accounts described came from not having dug enough places.