The islands of the Caribbean offered a bewildering variety of landscapes and resources to early prehistoric peoples. The diversity of their interactions with local environments led to different kinds of lifeways, dwellings, and material culture that are often difficult for archaeologists to interpret. Once consequence has been different ways of classifying cultural remains and of trying to build an overall picture of cultural development from the scattered, fragmentary, and often ambiguous evidence.
The earliest Caribbean peoples belonged to the so-called Archaic Period and appeared around 5500 B.C. at the sites of Banwari Trace and St. John Oropuche in Trinidad, opposite the South American mainland. They were hunters, fishers, and gatherers who lived a transient existence, probably in small family groups. They did not make or use pottery but did have spears tipped with bone, roughly shaped stone tools, and manos and metates for grinding. From their archaeological remains, it appears that they gathered vast quantities of shellfish, whose empty shells they discarded onto huge heaps known today as shell middens. These sites are typically located near mangrove swamps and beaches.
The earliest evidence for the human occupation of Cuba, far to the north, dates to a slightly later time, somewhere around 4000 B.C.. Sites such as Seboruco are often rock shelters or caves, with flaked-stone tools scattered on the floor. Some sites are thought to date back even earlier, possibly to 6000 B.C. However, around 2000 B.C., these early preceramic sites become more frequent and are divided into a number of different, and not universally accepted, subdivisions of the Archaic Period. Examples include Painted Cave in Cuba, Barrera-Mordan in the Dominican Republic, and Caño Hondo and Angostura in Puerto Rico, the latter site including human burials. Some sites, such as Cayo Redondo on Cuba, had a long life, spanning the period 2000 B.C. to A.D. 1300, and include shell middens and painted caves. On Antigua, the site of Jolly Beach flourished around 1800 B.C. as a workshop area where stone flakes were struck from the abundant local pebbles. Similarly, at Hope Estate on St. Martin, flint flakes and shell artifacts have been dated to between 2350 and 1800 B.C. On St. Thomas, the site of Krum Bay has yielded stone tools and jewelry made from bone and shell between 880 B.C. and 225 B.C.
Making archaeological sense of these early sites continues to be problematic. Some sites that lack pottery have been called preceramic and assigned to the Archaic Period rather than more accurately being called aceramic and thus potentially of a much later date. The most notorious problem has arguably been identifying the first preceramic inhabitants of Cuba. These people, called the Ciboney, lived in caves with lifeways defined by simple stone tools. They were assumed to be the ancestors of the “primitive” Guanahatabey people who occupied the same area when Europeans arrived. The thorny question remains whether the Guanahatabeys should be considered a surviving relic of the Archaic Period surrounded by more sophisticated pottery-using peoples or a creation resulting from our inability to make sense of a patchy archaeological record.
Somewhere between 500 and 200 B.C., a new and different kind of people arrived in the Caribbean. These were the pottery-using, village-dwelling Saladoid people who had left their South American homeland for Trinidad and then sailed north in seagoing canoes to colonize the Greater Antilles. Their arrival isolated, marginalized, and possibly absorbed the earlier hunter-gatherers of the Archaic Period.
The Saladoid peoples originated from the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela and brought with them a settled village life, agriculture, and a shamanic religion typical of tropical rainforest societies in lowland Amazonia. They grew manioc, sweet potato, cotton, and tobacco and introduced pottery making in the form of distinctive white-on-red decorated ceramics that take their name—Saladoid—from the type-site of Saladero in Venezuela. Their stone tools were more varied and efficient than those of their predecessors, and they were able to fell larger trees and clear more extensive areas for their fields and villages.
By about A.D. 300, Saladoid peoples had spread throughout the Caribbean, and most islands probably had some variation of Saladoid culture. The sea continued to play an important role in everyday and spiritual life, as canoe travel connected the islands with each other and also with mainland South America. For the Saladoid and later periods, there is a strong argument for looking at the islands and South America as an integrated unit—an “interaction sphere” of diverse but connected peoples and landscapes rather than the separate political entities they became after Europeans arrived.
Saladoid cultures eventually developed, in different ways on different islands, into what archaeologists call the Ostionoid cultural tradition, named after the Ostiones culture on Hispaniola (ca. A.D. 500). Local developments of the Ostionoid tradition are known as Meillacan in Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica; Elenan in the Leeward and Virgin Islands; and Palmetto in the Bahamas. On Hispaniola, local developments led, by around A.D. 1200, to the Chican Ostionoid culture—the name given by archaeologists to the remains of the Taíno peoples first encountered by Columbus in 1492.
The Taíno, like their Saladoid predecessors, lived a settled village life and practiced agriculture, supplementing their main food crops of manioc, maize, and sweet potatoes with guava, papaya, pineapple, and tobacco. They grew cotton from which they manufactured clothing; collected clams, oysters, and crabs; and hunted birds, snakes, manatees, and sea turtles. Their arts and crafts included body painting, earrings, nose ornaments, lip plugs, and colorful feather headdresses. Carved stone beads and ornaments known as çibas were worn with gold ornaments that were in fact usually the gold-copper-silver alloy known as guanín.
The Taíno were expert woodworkers and carved the distinctive ceremonial stools known as duhos. These were used by shamans (behiques) and chiefs (caciques) to connect them to supernatural powers and were often decorated with shell or guanín. The Taíno built large, elaborate canoes, traveling regularly between islands and maintaining a network of trade relationships. Many of their sophisticated guanín items were obtained in down-the-line maritime trade between islands from their original source in South America. Regarded as high-class items, these objects embodied supernatural power and as such were ceremonially exchanged by Taíno chiefs. It is no surprise that such valuable items were among those offered to Columbus in 1492 by Chief Guacanagarí on Hispaniola.
Taíno society was ruled by hereditary chiefs, with status inherited through the mother’s line. Consequently, high-born women had great status in Taíno society. Chiefs could have as many as thirty wives, suggesting that many marriages were little more than opportunistic political alliances. This tight organization of society is reflected in the size and sophistication of Taíno villages. The larger ones could have hundreds of communal houses occupied by extended families. They were arranged around a central plaza, which was used for social and religious events such as ceremonial dances called areítos and ball games known as batey. The chief’s house, or caney, was the largest of all and served as a council house for the community.
The religion of the Taíno was based on the shamanic tradition inherited from their Saladoid ancestors. They saw plants, animals, and landscapes as infused with spirit force derived from the ancestors and the natural world. It was the Taíno chiefs and shamans who controlled the forces of life and death through a philosophy founded on analogical symbolic reasoning. In such a spiritually animated universe, all things possessed sacred and secular importance.
The main focus of religion was the veneration of gods and spirits known as zemís whose supernatural powers were embodied in sacred images—that is, three-dimensional objects fashioned from stone, bone, wood, shell, clay, and cotton, sometimes in combination. Yúcahu was one of several major Taíno gods—an invisible lord of fertility and “spirit of cassava.” His female counterpart was Atabey, “Mother of Waters,” who was associated with rivers and the rain needed to fertilize the cassava crops. She was also responsible for women’s fertility and childbirth. With these deities and others, the Taíno symbolized their intimate relationship with the natural forces that shaped the world. This relationship was enshrined in myths that emphasized the idea of metamorphosis.
Mythic hero figures had superhuman animal strength, and animals possessed human qualities. Some animals were tribal ancestors, some trees the spirits of dead chiefs. Taíno myths accounted for the origins of the world and of women and tobacco. One myth told how women were created when woodpeckers pecked a hole in strange, sexless creatures, where female sexual parts are now located.
Although the evidence for warfare in Taíno society is ambiguous, battles undoubtedly took place between different chiefdoms to resolve disputes. Nevertheless, it was the Carib peoples of the Lesser Antilles to the east and south who were the common enemy because they raided Taíno islands mainly for marriageable women. Whether or not such accusations were true, the Taíno initially saw the Spanish as powerful potential allies against the traditional foe.
The Caribs, unlike the Taíno, were late arrivals in the Caribbean. They sailed large seagoing canoes from South America perhaps around A.D. 1400 and began colonizing the Lesser Antilles, especially Dominica, Martinique, St.Vincent, and Guadeloupe. They maintained close trading relationships with their mainland cousins up to and beyond the period of European colonization.
Carib society was primarily agricultural, though not as intensive as that of the Taíno. They grew and consumed manioc, making it into cassava bread, and also ate a stew known as pepper pot. These were supplemented by sweet potatoes, yams, beans, and tobacco. Fishing was also important, and the Carib used nets, hooks, and harpoons to catch fish. They also collected shellfish and hunted sea turtles and the agouti (Dasyprocta aguti),which had been introduced from South America.
Carib society was less hierarchical and sophisticated than that of the Taíno. There were no major chiefs, though each village had its own headman.Wider alliances seem to have formed only during war, at which time outstanding war leaders exercised temporary authority. Carib villages were small and focused on the men’s house, or carbet, which also served as the communal meeting place within which a special men-only language was spoken.
Carib arts and crafts were also basic when compared to those of the Taíno. Their pottery was undecorated, though basketry was highly prized, and cotton weaving was practiced to make hammocks and jewelry. Their canoes were especially valued due to the economic importance of long-distance maritime trade, which itself provided luxury items from South America such as the caracoli, a crescent-shaped guanín object worn as jewelry.
As with the Taíno, Carib religion followed the shamanic traditions of South America, where plants, animals, and landscapes were infused with the spirituality of ancestors and nature. There were few recognizable gods and no evidence of the elaborate zemí figures of the Taíno. Nevertheless, they made and wore figurines of stone and wood to protect against evil spirits known as mabouya and to decorate their war clubs and canoes. Good spirits were called akamboue, and each Carib was believed to have their own guardian spirit. Zoomorphic and geometric designs of these supernatural beings were carved as petroglyphs on boulders and rockfaces throughout the Carib region.
Carib culture is dramatically and endlessly misrepresented by the emphasis on cannibalism. Taíno accusations to Columbus of Carib cannibalism became a defining feature of savage behavior by indigenous Caribbean peoples.As noted before, so dominant did this image become that the terms “cannibal” and “cannibalism,” themselves derived from the name “Carib,” replaced the previous Greek term “anthropophagy” to describe the eating of human flesh.
Unlike the Taíno, the Caribs survived well into the European period in the Caribbean, but it was not until the seventeenth century that French missionaries in Dominica, Guadeloupe, and Martinique began to observe and record Carib cultural traditions. The most influential of these missionaries was the Dominican Father Raymond Guillaume Breton, the “Apostle to the Caribs.” Carib society as we know it today is in many respects a seventeenth-century creation and is clearly entangled with European propaganda and misunderstandings, and further confused by the comparatively little archaeological research that has been carried out to date.
The prehistoric Caribbean was a region of unique cultural development and diversity— as much a mosaic of peoples and places as it was to become after the arrival of Europeans.
Written by Nicholas J. Saunders in "The Peoples of the Caribbean - An Encyclopedia of Archaelogy and Traditional Culture", ABC-CLIO, USA, 2006, excerpts pp.12-16. Digitized, adapted aand illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.