Istwa Nou

The cemetery at Anse a la Gourde on Guadeloupe was excavated in enough detail to list what went into the graves. Whole queen conch shells. Pottery vessels. Beads of quartz and diorite. Shark teeth, pierced for stringing. Stone axes. In some graves a pot was set over the mouth of the pit, and in others a vessel was placed directly in front of the face of the dead person. One woman was buried with more than eleven hundred shell beads lying across her pelvis, almost certainly the remains of a garment or a belt that had been strung with them and rotted away around them. Somebody made those beads one at a time. A grave assembled like that is a statement about rank, and rank is easier to see in a burial than in a house, because a household can be modest while a funeral is public. These were people with positions, and the positions were marked when they died.

Strontium in tooth enamel records the geology of the place a person grew up, which makes it possible to sort the people buried at Anse a la Gourde on Guadeloupe into locals and incomers. The pattern that emerged concerns women. Incoming women were more often buried with objects that had come from elsewhere than incoming men were. The straightforward reading is a system in which women moved between islands, most likely through marriage alliances, and arrived carrying goods from home. The site's material supports the picture of a place with connections in every direction: flint from Antigua, greenstone from St Martin, cemi stone from Anguilla, all of it lying in a village on Guadeloupe. Marriage across water is a political instrument. It builds obligations between communities that no amount of trading does on its own, and it explains how settlements spread along a chain of islands managed to stay inside one social world.

The people at Anse a la Gourde on Guadeloupe changed what they ate over the centuries the site was occupied. In the earlier phases the bones are heavy with mammals, rice rats and agouti taken on land. Later the emphasis moves to a specialised inshore catch of reef fish, crabs and sea urchins, which calls for different gear, different timing and different knowledge. One detail is unusually precise. The West Indian top shell, Cittarium pica, had been opened by punching a hole in the shell to reach the animal. Later inhabitants stopped breaking the shells and appear to have cooked or grilled them whole, which leaves the shell intact in the midden. Through all of it the standbys held. Surgeonfish, jacks and parrotfish were eaten from beginning to end. A community that adjusts its methods this finely over centuries was watching its own reef closely and answering what more mouths and steady pressure were doing to it.