Istwa Nou

In Trinidad and Tobago the Early Ceramic Age is read through two pottery complexes in sequence. Cedros ware is scarce, known from two sites only. Palo Seco ware, which follows it, turns up widely. Palo Seco pots are thick walled, painted in red or black, and finished with elaborate modelled and incised adornos, the small applied faces and figures that sit on the rim or shoulder of a vessel. All that decoration points at the lower Orinoco, where the Barrancoid tradition of the South American mainland was established. Trinidad lies within sight of the continent, so the connection surprises nobody. What the pottery adds is that it stayed live and kept feeding new styles into the island long after first settlement. The number of sites with a single occupation layer also rises through this period, which is the signature of a growing population founding fresh villages instead of crowding into old ones, in the corner of the Caribbean closest to the mainland.

Dig into an Early Ceramic Age village in the Antilles and the valuables turn up in the rubbish. Personal ornaments of carnelian, greenstone, serpentinite and amethyst, the most laborious objects these communities made, were placed in the midden, the household refuse heap at the edge of the settlement. The placement was deliberate. Putting a prized thing into the ground of your own village makes a claim that everyone present can watch being made, and it fixes that claim in a spot the community walks past daily. Behind the ornaments sits a harder fact. Particular islands controlled particular minerals, and the communities holding them were autonomous, competitive and watching each other closely. The finished goods travelled anyway. Settlements scattered across hundreds of kilometres of open water stayed in contact because objects like these kept moving between them, which is what a social network looks like when it has to be maintained by canoe.

The rare stone in Caribbean village middens is evidence about politics. Carnelian, jadeite and amethyst appear in early Saladoid and Huecoid deposits as beads and amulets, and Keegan and Hofman read them as the working equipment of what anthropologists call a Big Man, a leader with no inherited office who holds a following by controlling something scarce and giving it away well. Command of a mineral source, and of the skilled hands that turn it into ornament, is exactly that kind of asset. Burying the finished pieces in village refuse or in graves belongs to the same method, since a gift that goes into the ground is a gift nobody can take back or resell. Read this way the ornaments are the instruments by which particular people built standing and held communities together across long stretches of water. It puts ambition and rivalry into a period usually discussed in terms of pottery styles.