Taíno

Taíno is the name now used for the Arawakan-speaking peoples who lived across most of the Caribbean when Europeans arrived, from the Bahamas through Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola and Puerto Rico to the northern Lesser Antilles. They were the first people of the Americas met by Christopher Columbus in 1492, and colonisation brought a catastrophic fall in their numbers. Yet Taíno heritage survives: many people in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica have Taíno ancestry, and growing communities identify as Taíno today.

The islanders did not call themselves Taíno as a single nation. The word appears to come from nitaíno, the term for the noble class, and was first applied to the whole population by the naturalist Constantine Rafinesque in 1836. Older writing calls them Island Arawaks. Some archaeologists warn that the label hides a variety of identities, though many modern descendants have adopted it as their own.

DNA studies suggest the Taíno descend largely from pottery-making farmers of the Ceramic Age, who reached the islands from the north-eastern coast of South America about 2,500 years ago and met older Archaic Age inhabitants who had arrived some 6,000 or 7,000 years ago.

Villages were led by a cacique, or cacica if a woman ruled, and were grouped into chiefdoms linked by marriage and alliance. Below the chief were the noble nitaínos, the priest-healers called bohíques and the working naborias, and rank passed through the mother's line. Families lived in large round houses around a central plaza, where ceremonies called areitos recalled the deeds of ancestors and a rubber-ball game, batey, was played. Farmers grew cassava in heaped mounds called conucos, along with sweet potato, maize, cotton and tobacco, and fished from dugout canoes. Words such as hammock, canoe and hurricane come from their language.

Religion centred on zemis, spirits and ancestors, and on the objects made to house them in wood, stone, shell or cotton. Major zemis included Atabey, linked with fresh water and fertility, and her son Yúcahu, spirit of cassava and the sea. Carved trays found with zemis are thought to have held cohoba, a hallucinogenic snuff.

Columbus landed in the Bahamas on 12 October 1492. From his second voyage in 1493, the Spanish demanded gold tribute on Hispaniola, and the encomienda system later forced Taíno into mines. Revolts followed: the chief Hatuey was burned at the stake in Cuba in 1512, and Enriquillo led a successful rebellion on Hispaniola in the 1520s. Estimates of Hispaniola's population before contact range from 10,000 to 1,000,000; Karen Anderson Córdova suggests at most 500,000, while a 2020 genetic analysis estimated no more than a few tens of thousands of people. By common estimates, 80 to 90 per cent of the Taíno population died within 30 years. Epidemics of smallpox, measles and other diseases were long seen as the main cause, but historians such as Andrés Reséndez argue that enslavement and forced labour were equally deadly, and some scholars, such as David Stannard, describe the encomienda as genocidal.

Spanish records declared the Taíno extinct by about 1550, but contemporary scholarship accepts that Taíno heritage survives, while debating its extent. Many Taíno women married Spanish or African men; the 1514 census of Hispaniola shows that 40 per cent of Spanish men there were married to Taíno women. Genetic studies find Indigenous mitochondrial DNA, inherited through the female line, in about 61 per cent of Puerto Ricans, about 33 per cent of Cubans and up to 30 per cent of Dominicans, while autosomal studies, mostly of Puerto Ricans, find that 10 to 20 per cent of their DNA is Indigenous. Communities in eastern Cuba have kept Taíno identity, and in the 2010 US census 9,399 people in Puerto Rico identified as Taíno. Some groups describe heritage passed on in secret, while others are revival movements.

Our maps for 1000, 1100, 1200, 1279, 1300, 1400 and 1492 draw an approximate Taíno territory, labelled Taino; the map years mark neither the culture's beginning nor its end. The Taíno homeland lies in today's Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and the Bahamas, and Columbus reached them on the first of his voyages.