Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean
Some scholars consider it important to distinguish the Taíno from the neo-Taíno nations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola, and the Lucayan of the Bahamas and Jamaica.
Linguistically or culturally these differences extended from various cognates or types of canoe: canoa, piragua, cayuco[1] to distinct languages.
[4][5] Still these groups plus the high Taíno are considered Island Arawak, part of a widely diffused assimilating culture, a circumstance witnessed even today by names of places in the New World; for example localities or rivers called Guamá are found in Cuba, Venezuela and Brazil.
[6] Thus, since the neo-Taíno had far more diverse cultural input and a greater societal and ethnic heterogeneity than the true high Taíno (Rouse, 1992).
These principalities are considered to have various affinities to the contemporary Taíno and neo-Taíno cultures from what is now known as Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and Haiti, but are generally believed somewhat different.
[7] The adroit farming and fishing skills of the neo-Taíno nations should not be underestimated; the names of fauna and flora that survive today are testimony of their continued use.
Tubers in most frequent use were yuca (Manihot esculenta)[10] a crop with perhaps 10,000 years of development in the Americas; boniato (the "sweet potato" — Ipomoea batatas),[11] and malanga (Xanthosoma sp.
The Syboneistas undertook studies and wrote of neo-Taínos as part and cover for independence struggles against Spain (Fajardo, 1829 - c. 1862; Gautier Benítez, 1873).
The Cuban town of (San Ramón de) Guaninao means the place of copper and is surmised to have been a site of pre-Columbian mining.
According to National Geographic, "studies confirm that a wave of pottery-making farmers—known as Ceramic Age people—set out in canoes from the northeastern coast of South America starting some 2,500 years ago and island-hopped across the Caribbean.
They had no chiefdoms or organized political structure beyond individual villages, but by the time of Spanish conquest many were under the control of the Cuban Taíno in eastern Cuba.
[22] According to oral history, the Igneri were the original Arawak inhabitants of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles before being conquered by the Caribs who are thought to have arrived from South America.
Contemporary sources like to suggest that the Caribs took Igneri women as their wives while killing the men, resulting in the two sexes speaking different languages.
They were an archaic hunter-gatherer people who spoke a language distinct from Taíno, and appear to have predated the agricultural, Taíno-speaking Ciboney.
[27] Fray Ramón Pané, often dubbed as the first anthropologist of the Caribbean, distinguished the Ciguayo language from the rest of those spoken on Hispaniola.
[28] Bartolomé de las Casas, who studied them and was one of the few who read Ramón Pané's original work in Spanish, provided most of the documentation about this group.
[32] The Spaniards wrongly assumed that the names given to the different territories were a reference "to what they called a Cacicazgo: a region dominated by a cacique.
The Tequesta had been present in the area for at least 2,000 years at the time of first European contact, and are believed to have built the Miami Stone Circle.
[33][34] Carl O. Sauer called the Florida Straits "one of the most strongly marked cultural boundaries in the New World", noting that the Straits were also a boundary between agricultural systems, with Florida Indians growing seed crops that originated in Mexico, while the Lucayans of the Bahamas grew root crops that originated in South America.
Our knowledge of the Cuban Indigenous cultures which are often, but less precisely, lumped into a category called Taíno (Caribbean Island Arawak) comes from early Spanish sources, oral traditions and considerable archeological evidence.
The Spanish found that most Cuban peoples were, for the most part, living peacefully in tidy towns and villages grouped into numerous principalities called Cacicazgos with an almost feudal social structure (see Bartolomé de las Casas).
These principalities are considered to have various affinities to contemporary Taíno and neo-Taíno cultures from Puerto Rico and Hispaniola, but are generally believed to have been somewhat different.
http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1993/2/93.02.12.x.html#top https://web.archive.org/web/20040818183442/http://www.banrep.gov.co/blaavirtual/credencial/hamerica.htm translated '.. the women go naked and are libidinous, lewd, and lustful but despite this their bodies are beautiful and clean...."
