Istwa Nou

Some islands in the Lesser Antilles worked as factories. At Trants on Montserrat, people made carnelian beads on a scale far beyond what one settlement could wear, and the carnelian itself was not from Montserrat. It came from Antigua, brought in by boat. At Hope Estate on St Martin the specialism was stone celts, cut from greenstone found on the island and sent out to other islands finished. The way to tell a workshop from a customer is the rubbish. Sites like Trants and Hope Estate are full of production waste, the flakes and broken blanks that come off making something. Settlements of the same date elsewhere in the region hold the finished object and none of the debris. Put those two patterns beside each other and a working economy appears: raw material moving one way, finished goods moving another, and communities specialising because they could count on getting what they did not make. All of it was running in the first millennium.

The site of Sorce, also called La Hueca, on the island of Vieques off Puerto Rico, held one of the finest lapidary workshops in the ancient Caribbean. Its craftsmen cut beads and amulets from nephrite and jadeite, stone that does not occur on Vieques. The suggested origins run as far as Guatemala or the interior of the Dominican Republic, and the serpentinite worked at the same site most likely came from Puerto Rico. Grenada, at the other end of the chain, had a comparable specialism at the Pearls site, where the material was amethyst. Objects like these were made to be worn, given and buried, and they announced who the wearer was and where the wearer stood. That is why they travelled. A maritime economy in prestige goods tied the Greater Antilles to the Lesser Antilles centuries before Europeans arrived and described the islands as isolated and their people as having nothing worth trading.

By the first millennium CE the Lesser Antilles were running an economy with specialists in it. Montserrat made beads. St Martin made stone celts. Other islands made neither and had both. Archaeologists separate producer from consumer by counting waste, since the manufacturing sites are buried in debris and the settlements that used the goods hold finished pieces alone. Mapping that distribution produces what Keegan and Hofman call a social geography, in which a given island holds an effective monopoly over a given mineral and trades on it. The arrangement let communities stay independent of one another while remaining necessary to one another. Each had a role that could be named, and the goods passing between them carried the terms of the relationship. The islands of the eastern Caribbean were an integrated system a thousand years before Europe arrived and reported finding scattered people living hand to mouth on whatever the sea happened to give them.