The Taíno
The first people Columbus met, and the words we still use
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The Taíno were the people living on the large Caribbean islands — Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and Puerto Rico — when Columbus arrived in 1492. The Taíno were long described as extinct, and that is imprecise in a way that matters. The population collapsed catastrophically, but genetic studies in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola show substantial Taíno ancestry in today's population, and some communities never stopped identifying as Taíno. Their agriculture — conucos, mounds of mixed crops — was well suited to tropical soils and was abandoned in favour of plantation methods that exhausted them.
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On the Caribbean islands lived the Taíno, organised in chiefdoms with villages, fields and ballcourts. Words such as canoe, hammock, hurricane, maize, tobacco and barbecue come from their language.
Sources
- Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus (1992)
- Fernandes m.fl., Nature 590 (2021) — karibisk befolkningsgenetikk
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