Descended from Arawak-speaking peoples from the Orinoco region, the Taino migrated along the Caribbean and established themselves throughout the Greater Antilles islands of Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Jamaica.
They had been there for some two thousand years by the time Columbus’ expedition arrived, and had built a society that demonstrated a complex, vaguely feudal political structure, thriving arts, and even some rudimentary monuments.
Taino Social Hierarchy
The Taino lived in a hierarchy of caciques (rulers), nitainos (upper class and shamans) and naborias (working class). Caciques ruled varying sizes of territory up to what are tantamount to small princedoms around their island. They lived in villages, although these had grown to great size and the website of the La Alita site in the Dominican Republic indicate developments tantamount to towns or cities. The scale of their communities is further reflected by the large courtyards, and megalithic and pictographic monuments that several sites are built around. Taino society was matrilineal, and the offices of leadership were open to women.
Artistic Traditions
Taino artistic traditions largely revolved around the creation of zemies: images of their divinities. They worked in stone, clay and wicker, and sometimes incorporated the skulls of honored caciques or shamans. Other examples include the megaliths: large standing stones with images of the divinities painted on, statues of the same carved out of stone or wood, and ceremonial celts, or axes. They also worked gold, hammering it into sheets to adorn zemies and furniture, and making jewellery, although gold casting technology was not within their grasp.
One of the great Taino art forms was their equivalent of a powwow: the areito. These were held for celebratory and commemorative purposes and involved dancing and singing, and Taino sites include dance courts, some of them surrounded with the megaliths mentioned above. The Taino also built courtyard spaces for the performance of their own version – called batey – of the ball game that was also a distinctive feature of the mainland Mesoamerican civilizations. Stone belts to protect the hips as the players received and returned the game ball are numerous in the archaeological record.
Gods and Rituals
The divinities were based on the forces of nature, especially opposite sides of them. The twin spirits of Sun and Rain, the earth goddess Atabey and Baibrama the agriculture god, and the sky god Yucahu and Guayaba the underworld god were among the major divinities they worshipped. They also enshrined animals: the coqui frog, whose young hatch as fully formed frogs (Atabey, the Earth Goddess, is depicted with a frog’s legs) and the sea turtle, which appeared briefly on their shores every year, were among those invested with great power. The shamans of the Taino relied on communication with the zemies as a way to advise their caciques. They used a hallucinogenic compound called Cohoba to induce a state of communion with the spiritual domain.
Downfall and Legacy
The Taino were an artistic, complex and thriving society by the 15th Century, a time known as their ‘Classic Period.’ Given more time, they might have discovered or learned from mainland civilizations how to build more sophisticated monuments.
But beginning in 1492, the expeditions of Christopher Columbus made landfall in Cuba and Hispaniola. They began to colonize and divide the lands to allow all colonists a share of gold-mining territory. In subduing the Taino as a labor force, the Spanish visited acts of shocking cruelty on them. Epidemics of European diseases and suicide further decimated the Taino population.
The priest Fray Ramon Pane was one of the clergy brought to the New World to see to the conversion of the native peoples, but ironically we are obliged to him for a great deal of information on Taino society and culture, although it is coloured by his bias, such as referring to the shamans as charlatans who cavort with the Devil.
It is impossible to demonstrate the scope, achievements and downfall of a society like that of the Taino in this brief survey, but it is nonetheless illuminating to see a whole society in those islands which is, nowadays, largely unknown.
Bibliography
Irving Rouse. The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus. Yale University Press, 1992
“Spirits of the Jaguar Episode 3: Hunters of the Caribbean Sea,” Nature, PBS, Broadcast 1996.
“Taino: Voices from the Past,” Nature, PBS Online, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/spirits/html/intro.html, accessed March 9, 2009
“The Taino World,” El Museo de Barrio, New York, http://www.elmuseo.org/taino/tainoworld.html, accessed March, 2009
Fray Ramón Pané, An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians : Cronicles of the New World Encounter,
