Istwa Nou

The Antillean preceramic period is organised around what archaeologists call a collector mode of life. People kept mobile settlements and timed their movements to resources that came available in a particular season. M. Veloz Maggiolo and A. G. Pantel set out the pattern: a structured yearly cycle running between coastal stations where shellfish were gathered and inland camps used for hunting and plant collection. Those movements were planned. They depended on knowing, across a whole archipelago, where the food would be and when, and on returning to the same places year after year. That knowledge is what made a stable human presence possible in the islands for three thousand years before anyone there made pottery. It also did not disappear. The ceramic age societies that followed inherited the environmental knowledge along with the territory, which is one reason the Taino could feed a dense population on land that European planters later declared exhausted.

E. Vento Canosa and D. Gonzalez examined indigenous skeletons recovered from sites across Cuba and published what the bones say about ordinary life before 1492. The remains carry chronic conditions, shortfalls in nutrition, and injuries of the kind that come from repeated specialised work: hauling, paddling, grinding, diving. Infectious disease left its marks as well. Set beside the early Spanish chronicles, which tend to describe island people living in easy abundance under a generous sky, the skeletal record reads as a correction written in bone. People here worked hard, went short in bad seasons, and got hurt doing the jobs their communities needed done. I keep this on the list because both pictures get used politically. The paradise version turns the conquest into a fall from innocence and its victims into scenery. The bones make them workers with occupational injuries, which is a harder thing to sentimentalise and a more useful thing to know.

Human occupation leaves phosphorus in soil. Bone, ash, food waste and excrement all deposit it, and it stays put for centuries after every other trace has gone. L. T. R. Roth applied soil chemistry to Lucayan settlements on Middle Caicos, where the sand is so uniform that ordinary excavation struggles to tell a house floor from the ground beside it. The phosphorus readings drew the map the sand had hidden: cooking areas here, refuse deposits there, living floors kept clear of both. What the readings describe is a village run by rules. Waste went in designated places, particular work happened in particular zones, and the arrangement held long enough and consistently enough to register in the chemistry of the ground. Villages of a few hundred people are usually recovered as scatters of artefacts and reconstructed by guesswork. This method returns their internal order, and the order turns out to be deliberate.

At Punta Cana on the eastern end of Hispaniola, excavation has reached early Meillacoid occupation, a phase belonging to the shift toward larger agricultural communities. M. Veloz Maggiolo, E. Ortega and F. Luna Calderon read the deposits as the record of people working two food systems at once. They took what the reef and the shallows gave them, and they planted root crops in the ground behind, and the settlement was placed where both lay within reach. Pottery styles and stone tools from the site tie it to changes running through the Greater Antilles in the same period. The Dominican Republic and Haiti share one island and one archaeological sequence, whatever the border does to the way each country gets written about. Sites at the far eastern end of Hispaniola belong to the same story as the sites on the northern plain, and treating them separately is a habit of the last two centuries.

In the Yuma region of eastern Hispaniola, the site of Atajadizo served as a centre of politics and ceremony. M. Veloz Maggiolo and his colleagues found earthen mounds and open plazas laid out for public use, ground meant to hold the areito, the danced and sung performance in which a community recited what it knew about itself. High status Chicoid vessels came out of the site along with worked stone collars, objects belonging to people at the top of the order. The farming settlements around it fell within the reach of whoever ran the place. That arrangement, a ceremonial centre with agricultural country attached and a chief in charge of both, is the standard shape of power in the Greater Antilles before 1492. The plaza is the part worth holding onto. Authority here was exercised in the open, in front of everyone, through performance whose words the crowd already knew.

Ciboney is a label colonial writers applied to Caribbean people who did not farm, and it came with an assumption attached, that these were remnants of an earlier population stranded by the arrival of more advanced newcomers. Jacques Roumain and the Cuban archaeologists who followed him took the material apart. At sites in Cuba and in Haiti, stone tool assemblages of the Ciboney type turn up close to Ceramic Age deposits, which puts both populations in the same landscape at the same time, trading with each other and using the same rivers and shores. That is a relationship. The picture of one people simply replacing another is convenient for anybody who wants history to run in a single direction. The ground under Haiti says the island held more than one kind of society at once, within reach of each other. Roumain was making this argument from Port-au-Prince in 1943.