Istwa Nou

The communities of central and southern Cuba worked a coastline and an interior that differ sharply from one another, and they arranged their settlements to draw on both. Lourdes Dominguez identified a series of these sites and found in them something more than a record of the centuries before contact. The deposits hold traditional shell tools lying alongside ceramics of early colonial manufacture, the two together in the same ground. That mixture is the opening phase of what gets called transculturation, the process by which two populations alter one another. It is also evidence of survival. People whose world was being taken apart went on making the tools they had always made and took up what the newcomers brought, because that is what a household does when the terms of life change. Variation between one part of the Caribbean and another is easy to flatten into a single indigenous story. The southern shore of Cuba does not fit it.

The Turks and Caicos sit on a bank of shallow water carrying enormous beds of queen conch. The Lucayans living there built an economy on it, taking the animals in quantity, drying the meat so that it would travel, and working the shell into tools. Both went south as exports to the larger populations of the Greater Antilles. What came back was of a different order. At MC-6 on Middle Caicos, the entrepot that handled this traffic, excavation found high status Chicoid vessels and the specialised bottles used for manioc beer, brought in from Hispaniola. Small dry islands with limited soil made themselves necessary by supplying something the big islands wanted and could not get in bulk at home. That takes canoes crossing open water on a schedule, quantities agreed in advance, and people at both ends who trusted the arrangement to hold. The northern Caribbean ran a specialised export trade before Europe knew these islands existed.