Istwa Nou

The valley of the Rio Portugues in Puerto Rico has been excavated in enough detail to follow one community's relationship with its animals across a thousand years. The zooarchaeological work by G. R. DuChemin sorts the bones by what was done with them. Some species were food. Some supplied raw material for tools. Some appear in contexts that indicate ritual use. Several species did more than one job. That range means the people here held a precise working knowledge of what lived around them and what each animal was good for. Across the change from the Early to the Late Ceramic Age the use of these resources intensifies and the management of the landscape becomes more organised, which is what happens when a population grows and stays put. Bones are the most ordinary thing in an excavation and among the most informative. They record meals, meals record daily life, and daily life is the part of the pre Columbian Caribbean that written sources never touch.

Across the pre Columbian Caribbean, infants had their heads shaped. The work was done in the first months of life, while the skull is still soft, by binding or by boards, and the result was permanent. A. van Duijvenbode's research reads the modified skulls as identity markers. The shape a person carried announced the lineage or the social rank they had been born into, and it announced it for life to everyone they met. The styles vary from island to island, which means the technique was local while the idea behind it was regional. Communities agreed that a head should be shaped and disagreed about the shape. This is one of the few direct records of what these people considered beautiful and how they made social position visible. They marked it on the body itself, in the one place it could not be removed, lost or given away.

Isotope work on human remains from sites across Puerto Rico gives a rough census of who moved. Most individuals tested spent their whole lives inside a single river valley, near where they were born. A steady minority did not, and their movement runs between the coast and the interior of the island. That minority deserves attention out of proportion to its size, because people who move carry goods, news, techniques and marriage ties with them, and internal traffic of that kind is what holds an island together as one society instead of a collection of valleys. The same analyses describe the diet. It balanced land animals, chiefly the hutia, Isolobodon portoricensis, a large rodent the islanders kept and ate, against a wide range of reef and offshore fish and the crops grown in garden plots. G. R. DuChemin and others built this picture out of bone chemistry, which reports on lives that left no other record.

Barbados sits apart from the rest of the Lesser Antilles in the way that matters most to people making tools: it is coral limestone, without the volcanic rock that supplied the other islands. Through the post Saladoid centuries its communities changed how they lived and what they made, and P. L. Drewett's work reads those changes as adaptation to the island's particular ground. Settlement patterns shifted and material culture shifted with them. Withdrawal from the region is what did not happen. Goods from elsewhere keep appearing in Barbadian deposits, so the island stayed inside the exchange networks running through the chain while developing styles that belong to nobody else. Holding both at once, a distinct local identity and continuing traffic with the neighbours, is the normal condition of an island society and the hardest one for outsiders to describe. Barbados had its own trajectory through the Late Ceramic Age, and it ran alongside the region rather than behind it.

Carvings pecked into rock are scattered through the Lesser Antilles and Trinidad, and C. N. Dubelaar's survey shows they are not placed at random. They cluster at springs, at pools in rivers, and in caves. The motifs repeat as well: figures with their limbs bound close to the body, and stylised faces matching the cemí imagery known from the Greater Antilles. Water sources and cave mouths are the places where one world was understood to open into another, and marking them permanently in stone is a claim about where the boundary lies. The same claim, in the same visual language, appears across hundreds of kilometres of island chain. Beliefs travelled the archipelago as reliably as pottery and conch did, and communities separated by open sea agreed about which places were sacred and how to say so. These carvings are the oldest surviving public art in the Caribbean, and they were made to be found again.