The Prehistory and Early History of the Caribbean
Samuel M. Wilson
(a version of this paper appeared in C. A. Woods and F. Sergile, (eds.), Biogeography of the West Indies, Patterns and Perspectives, 2nd ed. Boca Raton, CRC Press, 2001)
Introduction
Compared to other parts of the Americas, humans came relatively late to the islands of the Caribbean, arriving around 6000 years ago. They brought with them many mainland plants and animals and had a profound impact on the endemic flora and fauna. Over time, several additional groups of human migrants came into the Caribbean, supplanting or joining the existing populations. Each group brought with them new species and new techniques for exploiting the land and sea. Through many millennia the islanders came to know the island environments intimately. By the time Columbus arrived more than 200 generations of indigenous Caribbean people had come and gone, passing their knowledge and relationship with Caribbean environments on to their children.
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This paper provides an overview of the archeological evidence for the human occupation of the West Indies. Despite a century's research on Caribbean prehistory, there are many parts of this story that are unknown, or imperfectly known. This account places emphasis on the historical processes at work in the Caribbean, emphasizing both the migrations of new people into the islands, and the long periods of cultural interaction and cultural divergence that took place. Finally, it details the ways in which the indigenous people’s adaptations to Caribbean environments have been maintained by their descendants, and passed on to more recent Caribbean immigrants whose origins were in Africa and Europe. The earliest radiocarbon dates from the Caribbean range from 3500 to 4000 years B.C., and come from archeological sites located in Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. These first migrants brought with them a stone tool technology based on large chert blades, and they found stone sources of sufficient quality to continue to make their macroblade tools in the greater Antilles. One of the closest places in terms of distance, and the closest in terms of similarities in contemporary artifact assemblages, is the Yucatan Peninsula. The chronological chart below shows a comparison of radiocarbon dates from archeological sites in Belize with some of the earliest dates from the Greater Antilles. While other points of origins have been suggested for the first colonists -- Northern South America and Florida, for instance -- at present the Yucatan Peninsula seems to be the most likely source (for discussions see Wilson, Iceland, and Hester, 1998). |
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When people first moved into the greater Antilles, they made their living by hunting, fishing, and collecting while foods, just as they had in Central America. They nevertheless had to make significant changes in their diet. In the islands, some of the plants and animals that could be used for food or different, and they had to adjust to other differences, such as a lack of large land mammals. Apart from their distinctive stone tools, and a few well-known sites, the life ways of these early Caribbean migrants are not well-known. It is a priority for Caribbean archaeologist to explore this early period of human occupation in order to understand the interaction of people with extinct plants and animals, and in general to understand better this period of adaptation to islands environments.
At present, early sites are known from Cuba and Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic). By around 2000 B.C. a number of regional variants had appeared, based on the presents an absence of distinctive stone tools and other artifacts (Veloz Maggiolo and Vega 1982). Related sites extend through Puerto Rico and into the eastern Caribbean, although it is not completely clear that these people came from the Greater Antilles (Lundberg 1980). Distinctive additions to some of the these artifact assemblages were implements made of ground stone -- axes, bowls, and carved objects of art (Rouse 1992, Veloz Maggiolo 1976).
Also around 2000 B.C. another group migrated into the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico from Trinidad and mainland South America. Like the people living in the Greater Antilles, they also did not rely on domesticated plants or animals. They lived as fisher-collectors on the wild foods of the sea and coastal regions, and traveled widely through the archipelago. Their sites are mostly coastal, consisting of shell scatters or shell mounds. Most of their tools and material goods were likely made of wood or woven material that has not survived. What have survived are axes or adzes made of the thick flares of conch shells and small flint flakes and tools (Davis 1993, Lundberg 1989, Drewett 1995). Over time, and probably with continued interaction with both the inhabitants of the Greater Antilles and the South American mainland, the occupants of the Lesser Antilles developed an elaborate tradition of objects made of ground stone. These were primarily axes, but they also included other objects carefully carved whose functions apart from symbolic ones are unclear (Fewkes 1907, Harris 1983, Loven 1935).
Archaeologists have termed these sites “Preceramic” or “Archaic” because the people did not make pottery, or live in permanent villages. Their sites are widespread, and with more careful and sophisticated techniques archaeologists are learning more about these people and their interactions with Caribbean environments. For example, archaeologist and paleoethnobotanist Lee Newsom has found macrobotanical evidence for primrose (Oenothera sp.), which was probably used as a medicinal plant, on a preceramic site on Nevis (Newsom 1993). Between 2000 and 1500 B.C. Puerto Rico and the northernmost Lesser Antilles were likely an area of interaction for people with very different origins and histories (Lundberg 1991, Rouse 1992: 49-70, Veloz Maggiolo et al. 1974). However, little is know of the long period of interaction between these two (or more) Archaic groups who lived in the Caribbean prior to the arrival of ceramics-using horticulturalists from South America.
Saladoid Migrations
In the last 500 years B.C., a new group or groups of people moved into the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico. They came from the Orinoco and other rivers along the northeastern coast of South America. In terms of the material remains they left behind, the appearance of the “Saladoid” people was very obvious. (The term Saladoid was coined by Irving Rouse in 1964 to refer to the ceramic series that was comparable to what was found at the Venezuelan site of Saladero). In contrast to the smaller sites of their predecessors, Saladoid people lived in large, permanent sites, dense with debris and marked by unmistakable white-on-red painted and zone-incised-crosshatched pottery. Saladoid sites are similar from island to island and at first archaeologists saw them as part of a relatively coherent and contemporaneous wave of migration coming from South America.
As archaeologists have excavated more sites and run more radiocarbon dates, the picture has become more complex. Dates for the earliest sites with ceramics on the islands of the Lesser Antilles range from around 500 B.C. to A.D. 100 (Haviser 1997) with little chronological continuity from island to island. There is greater variability in the ceramics at these sites as well, further suggesting that there may have been two or more migrations, possibly with additional cultural divergence once people were established in the Caribbean (Rodríguez 1997: 81). Indeed, there may have been an ongoing interaction between island and mainland populations, with multiple moves up and down the island arc.
By the last hundred years B.C., and lasting until around A.D. 600, a permanent Saladoid occupation was in place from Trinidad, through the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico, to the eastern tip of the Dominican Republic. They cultivated domesticated plants such as cassava or yuca that they brought with them from the mainland, and also lived on the wild animals of the land, littoral, and sea. They lived in pole and thatch houses, large enough to house extended families (Versteeg 1989). Their settlements are widely spaced throughout the Lesser Antilles and Puerto. They chose settings with abundant resources and fresh water, but apparently preferred to have some distance between themselves and neighboring communities (for extensive discussion of Saladoid period, see Siegel 1989).
On Puerto Rico, and especially on the east coast of the Dominican Republic, the Saladoid people would have been in contact with the preceramic or Archaic people who had already lived there for a very long time. There is artifactual evidence that the period of interaction between these two groups lasted for several centuries on Hispaniola (the island shared by the Dominican Republic and Haiti) (Rouse 1992: 90-104).
Post-Saladoid Changes
Important changes took place in the Lesser and Greater Antilles between A.D. 500 and 1000. In the Lesser Antilles there were changes in pottery manufacture, food-gathering behavior, house construction, and settlement organization. In most parts of the Antilles, there is also evidence for population growth. While Saladoid sites had been fairly widely scattered, but occupied for long periods, the later sites seem to be far more numerous, but perhaps less permanent (Versteeg et al. 1993). The same sort of population growth took place in the Greater Antilles, and new areas were occupied more intensively than ever before. The upland interior of Puerto Rico was occupied by village-dwelling farmers, as was Jamaica, Hispaniola, and the eastern end of Cuba. The colonization of the Bahamas also began in this period. Rouse has grouped the various kinds of ceramics produced in this period under the series “Ostionoid,” named for the site of Ostiones. Ostionoid pottery is found through the Greater Antilles and northern Lesser Antilles. It is generally plainer and less well made than Saladoid pottery, and in most areas is characterized by red or orange-red paint on the outside.
| Between A.D. 500 and 1000 there were other major changes in the Caribbean. The first clear signs of increasing social and political complexity date to this period (Alegría 1983). In Puerto Rico the first stone-lined ceremonial plazas or ball courts were built. These elaborate installations were the focus of group activity for communities that were much larger than the Saladoid groups, and they reflect the emergence of more complex polities. At the same time, there is increasing evidence of the kinds of artifacts that reflect personal status and power, suggesting that the social differentiation that the Spanish witnessed in the late 15th Century was developing at least by the 8th Century. |  |
The period between A.D. 700 and the period of European conquest, and especially after A.D. 1200, saw the fluorescence of the Taíno chiefdoms. An important characteristic of this period was the continued cultural interaction and change among the Greater Antillean groups. Although pottery, horticulture, and sedentary village life were adopted across Hispaniola, Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas, there was not homogeneity in language and culture. One important subgroup comprised the descendants of the Archaic people who had lived in the islands for millennia. It now appears that in some places their descendants persisted as a self-identified minority among the people encountered by Columbus (Wilson 1993). In other places, throughout Hispaniola and beyond, the legacy and impact of the Archaic people played an important role in the emergence of a Taíno cultural identity. That is, the people of the Greater Antilles encountered by Columbus had a complex history with both Archaic and Saladoid roots, and the explosion of expressive culture exhibited by the Taíno comes out of this conjunction. The indigenous people of the Caribbean were far were more culturally diverse than Columbus and the Europeans realized. In 1492 the cultural diversity of the Greater and Lesser Antilles can be described as a cultural mosaic or matrix (Whitehead 1995a, Wilson 1993).
In the Lesser Antilles in the centuries before European contact there was also a great deal of cultural diversity, and significant interaction and trade both with the Greater Antilles and the South American mainland. The Leeward Islands, densely populated until about A.D. 1200, saw a significant loss of population, or perhaps even abandonment (Corinne Hofman, personal communication; Wilson, forthcoming). To the south the Windward Islands had a complex mélange of groups with shifting and permeable boundaries and varying degrees of interaction with mainland and other island groups (Allaire 1987, Boomert 1995, Hulme and Whitehead 1992, Whitehead 1995b).
European Conquest
In 1492 Columbus’s ships arrived in the Bahamas, and then sailed along the northeastern coast of Cuba before crossing to Haiti. There, and later in the rest of the Greater Antilles, they found large populations of people they came to call the Taíno. These people lived in villages numbering into the thousands of inhabitants, under the authority of village leaders. Regional polities or confederations linked seventy or more of these villages. They interacted through trade, the ball game, and gift-giving, and they cooperated in wars fought with other cacicazgos or chiefdoms. Hispaniola had five large cacicazgos, and many smaller ones (Wilson 1990). Caciques, or chiefs, as well as men and women of high status, were given special treatment. They were carried on litters or on the backs of their servants, and some caciques had an accompanying spokesman to speak for him. The Taíno elite were adorned with gold jewelry and other elaborate objects made of beads, bone, feathers, and woven cotton.
Although the Spaniards had no experience with this form of social organization and did not recognize it, the Taíno were matrilineal. Descent and inheritance was passed through the female line, and the highest ranking person in the social system would be the senior woman in the dominant matriline. In most cases, however, men held the office of cacique, reflecting the distinction between social hierarchy and political power. The cacicazgos required some degree of centralized decision-making in warfare with other groups and perhaps in economic matters as well. Interior cacicazgos had specialists on the coasts drying fish for transport up the rivers. The Taíno also used a form of intensive cultivation of manioc in conucos, mounded and fertilized planting beds.
The Taíno cacicazgos interacted with one another through occasional warfare, but also through the ball game. Ball court complexes were sometimes located in areas between polities as well as in their centers, and these may have served as places to get together for ceremonies, trade, elite marriages, and other forms of interaction. The Taíno traveled between polities, and also from island to island in large, ocean-going canoes, some of which could hold up to one-hundred people (Bartolomé de Las Casas and Gonzalo Oviedo y Valdez are two very important observers of Taíno life; other primary sources are discussed in Wilson 1990).
The expressive creativity of the Taíno was a dominant characteristic of their cultural fluorescence, which was still in full swing at the time of European conquest. This creativity can be seen in Taíno ceramics, stone and wood carving, weaving, beadwork, and other media. Taíno art often combined themes of traditional mythology with the transformational experiences of shamanic trances in experimental and innovative ways (McGinnis 1997). The Taíno expressed equal creativity in their dynamic social and political institutions. It can be argued that this creative explosion is related to the fact that the Greater Antilles was the scene of a long period of cultural interaction and synthesis between the descendants of the Saladoid people and the Central American migrants who had occupied the Greater Antilles for thousands of years. The culturally plural environment favored innovation over conservatism and gave an advantage to individuals or families that could attract multiple constituencies.
After the arrival of Europeans and Africans
The Taíno fluorescence was cut short by the arrival of Columbus and those who came after him. Hispaniola, and later Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Jamaica, became European footholds in the Americas, and the people of these islands bore the brunt of the first wave of European conquest. Gold was discovered in Hispaniola and led to a harsh system of forced tribute payments that disrupted the subsistence economy and led to famine. This system became a prototype for other conquests of indigenous people. More devastating were the epidemics the Europeans brought with them. Disease, warfare, and famine brought about the destruction of the Taíno chiefdoms in a decade, and by the repartamiento of 1514 had reduced the indigenous population, which may have numbered in the millions, to a few thousand (Cook and Borah 1971, Henige 1978, Wilson 1990). The Greater Antilles were important to the European colonial enterprise for gold, then cattle, but the region’s significance was soon eclipsed by Mexican and Andean projects and it became a colonial backwater.
The Lesser Antilles fared slightly better in the early conquest period. The Lesser Antillean people were hunted by European slavers seeking to replace dying indigenous populations in the Greater Antilles, and the populations of whole islands were killed in raids, but in general the people of the Lesser Antilles were more successful in surviving European conquest than those in the big islands (Kiple and Ornelas 1996). To a great extent this was because people in the Lesser Antilles were better able to survive the waves of epidemics that had such a devastating impact on the more densely populated Greater Antilles. Also, the people of the Lesser Antilles were highly mobile and could escape, or attack, by canoe. Their effective resistance to colonization kept Europeans out of most of the islands for about 130 years after Columbus. During that time the various European groups who interacted with the islanders – English, Dutch, French, Danish, Spanish and others – conceived and perpetuated the view of the indigenous people of the Lesser Antilles as “Caribs,” an ethnic designation that originated in Columbus’s first voyage (Allaire 1996). The “Island Caribs” played an important role, as allies and enemies, in the European colonization of the Lesser Antilles. Their descendants still live in some of the islands, and in Central America, where the Garifuna people were moved in the 18th Century (Davidson 1980, Gordon 1998).
Indigenous legacies in the Caribbean
One important dimension of continuity between the pre- and post-conquest Caribbean is the characteristic ethnic heterogeneity of the region. Today the Caribbean is one of the most ethnically diverse regions in the world, with dozens of languages and cultural affiliations. In large part this is an artifact of the colonial competition for the islands from the 16th through the 20th Centuries. But it may also reflect something of the nature of the archipelago; from the earliest human colonizations of the Caribbean, the open sea between the islands facilitated travel, rather than hindered it (Watters and Rouse 1989). The sea linked villages with each other and populations with their distant relatives. Scattered groups are still part of a community linked by the sea.
The legacy of the indigenous people in the Caribbean is more pervasive than this parallel might suggest. In both the Greater and Lesser Antilles there was interaction between the indigenous people and the African and European groups who moved into the islands. This period of overlap was longer and more significant in some areas than others, but in all areas there is significant continuity of pre-conquest culture and lifeways. This continuity in economic patterns, language, myth, and even genetic makeup is more evident in the Lesser Antilles, where indigenous groups were less devastated by the first wave of European conquest and still survive, but they exist throughout the Caribbean. The detailed list of hold-overs, particularly in food names and food preparation practices, is considerable (Wilson 1997), but it doesn’t capture the more pervasive human-land relationship that was adopted by the most recent wave of human migration to the islands.
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