Istwa Nou

Through the Late Ceramic Age the settlements of the northern Lesser Antilles get fewer and smaller, and Puerto Rico shows the same trend at the same time. Communities also began choosing sites that were remote or naturally protected, tucked away from the obvious landing places. Something was pressing on these islands. The material culture of the period shows heavy interaction with the Greater Antilles, the kind involving prestige goods and religious objects rather than everyday trade, and the smaller islands were being drawn into political and ideological systems centred elsewhere. Local trajectories that had run independently for centuries were interrupted. Where a community puts its houses is the most practical statement it can make about whom it expects to see coming. Fewer villages, in harder places to reach, sited for shelter and for warning, describe a region under pressure from outside itself, several centuries before any European sail appeared on that horizon.

By the Late Ceramic Age the communities of the Lesser Antilles were part of something larger than their own islands. Prestige goods moved along the chain, religious objects and their meanings moved with them, and people moved as well. Keegan and Hofman describe the process as integration into the sociopolitical and ideological spheres of the Greater Antillean polities: local art, ritual and rank all show the influence, and local societies were reorganised around it. What these communities did not do is dissolve. Each island kept working its own materials and its own version of the shared repertoire while participating in a wider Taíno world. The Caribbean that Columbus sailed into was already an interconnected region with its own centres, its own long distance exchange and its own prestige economy. The sea between the islands had been a road for centuries before any European used it as one.

Across the Greater Antilles and the northern Lesser Antilles, excavation keeps producing small masks cut from shell or stone, carved with stylised human or spirit faces and made to be carried. They were ritual objects, held or worn in ceremonies that bound people to one another and to the powers they recognised. The distribution is what matters. Islands separated by long stretches of open water hold the same object made in the same idiom, which means the canoes carried more than food, pots and stone. They carried the images a person needs in order to worship. Ideas moved on those routes as reliably as cargo did. The Classic Taino religious system is usually described as belonging to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, with the smaller islands treated as its outer edge. These masks were in circulation well beyond that heartland. Whatever the political map looked like, the spiritual one covered a great deal more water.

Morne Cybele and Morne Souffleur stand on the high plateau of La Desirade, a small island in the Guadeloupe group with thin soil, broken limestone and very little fresh water. Both were occupied around the middle of the fifteenth century, within a few decades of the first European crossing. Living up there meant solving the water problem and hauling everything over rough ground, work the fertile coastal country of the larger islands does not demand. People took it on anyway. That is the interesting part. In the last stretch of the pre-Columbian period, communities in the eastern Caribbean were still moving into new places, including places with no obvious advantage, which is the behaviour of a population under pressure or a population still growing. Either way the Lesser Antilles were not in decline when Europe arrived. These islands were being settled right up to the moment the record changed hands.