Istwa Nou

Morne Cybele occupies La Montagne, the steep limestone plateau that rises to 275 metres on La Desirade. The occupied core is small, somewhere between 200 and 300 square metres. The height buys shelter from the strong currents and unpredictable winds that make the surrounding water difficult, and the northern cliffs make the site hard to approach from that side, which cuts both ways for the people living on it. A shell of Cittarium pica taken from the deposit was radiocarbon dated to the middle of the fifteenth century, so the community was in place a few decades before Columbus sailed. That date is what makes the site useful. It shows what people in the eastern Caribbean were doing immediately before the arrival that would define everything written about them afterwards. Morne Souffleur, on the same plateau, belongs to the same pattern. Small, high, difficult to reach, and chosen on purpose.

Morne Souffleur was found by walking La Desirade systematically rather than by chance, and what the survey turned up closely resembles Morne Cybele on the same high plateau. Both sites sit where the elevation shelters them from the currents, both are protected by the steep cliffs along the northern shore, and both look out over the channels canoes had to use. One site of that kind can be put down to local preference. Two of them, matching each other, make a pattern, and the pattern points to a deliberate move onto marginal ground late in the pre-Columbian period. The people who lived there had a view of everything passing to the north and east of Guadeloupe. Within a few decades of their settling, ships of a kind nobody on that plateau had seen would come up the same channel. The vantage they chose for their own reasons faced the direction the change arrived from.