Talking Taino: Caribbean Natural History from a Native Perspective

Introduction

Introduction They are known today as Lucayan Taínos: an anglicized version of the Spanish “Lucayos,” which derives from the Arawakan words Lukkunu Kaíri (“island men”). The Lucayans share a common ancestry with the Taíno societies of Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Jamaica (the Greater Antilles), who they separated from around AD 600 when they began to colonize the Turks & Caicos andThe Bahamas (hereafter called the Lucayan Islands). By 1492, they had settled all of the larger Lucayan Islands. In addition, they continued to exchange goods with other Taínos living in the Greater Antilles. To date, most of what has been written about the Taínos has drawn upon the written record left by the Spanish. However, because the chronicles were written to serve political objectives, be they for or against the native peoples, and because the chroniclers themselves were limited in their abilities to understand a nonwestern culture, these documents are rife with errors and misinformation. The uncritical use of the historical record has hampered efforts to understand native West Indian societies. For although we continue to speak of Taínos as a single unified group, there were regional differences in language and culture, if not also in race. One needs look only to the Soviet Union or the former Yugoslavia to be reminded of the fragility of national identities. This introduction draws on the last two decades of anthropological scholarship to present a brief chronicle of the development and extinction of Lucayan Taíno culture. 2 / Introduction Origins The origins of the Lucayan Taínos are traced to the banks of the Orinoco River in Venezuela. As early as 2100 BC villages of horticulturalists who used pottery vessels to cook their food had been established along the Middle Orinoco. During the ensuing two millennia their population increased in numbers, and they expanded down river and outward along the Orinoco’s tributaries to the coasts of Venezuela, the Guianas, and Trinidad. Their movements are easily traced because the pottery they manufactured is so distinctive. Called Saladoid after the archaeological site of Saladero, Venezuela, their vessels were decorated with white-on-red painted, modeled and incised, and crosshatched decorations (see plate 1). Saladoid peoples expanded through the Antilles at a rapid pace. Because their earliest settlements, which date before 400 BC, are in the Leeward Islands, the Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico, the inescapable conclusion is that most of the Lesser Antilles were leapfrogged in a direct jump from Venezuela/Trinidad to Puerto Rico and its neighbors. Moreover, the conditions, which stimulated the initial migration into the Antilles, continued to fuel dispersal from South America bringing a variety of related ethnic groups into the Antilles over the next millennium. Saladoid peoples lived in small villages and practiced swidden agriculture in 2. Map of the insular Caribbean showing culture areas. Introduction / 3 which a variety of different crops were cultivated in small gardens, a practice very similar to present-day “casual cultivation.” Due to the limited fertility of the soil, gardens were cultivated for only a few years before new gardens had to be cleared. Frequent movement of village sites is evident from the absence of deeply stratified sites. A number of the early sites are located inland on watercourses adjacent to prime agricultural land, but most Saladoid sites are in coastal settings. In both settings, horticulture was the primary source of food. At the inland sites, land crab remains are the main component, while at coastal villages the shells of marine mollusks and bones of fishes were the most common food remains in the trash middens. For some reason the Saladoid advance stalled after they had colonized eastern Hispaniola. Irving Rouse (1992) has suggested that a large and well-established population of hunter-gatherers barred their forward progress, and that the Saladoid population needed time to grow and refine their adaptation to island life before the frontier was breached. Some of the resident foragers may have been assimilated before further expansion took place. The next phase of cultural development is announced by a marked change in material culture. Elaborate pottery decorations disappear, especially in frontier locations where most of the pottery was undecorated except for occational red slip or simple modeling.These simplified designs have been classified as the Ostionoid series, named for the archaeological site of Punta Ostiones in western Puerto Rico. By AD 600 the “Ostionoid peoples” had resumed the...