from before and after the time of arrival of the Saladoids in the West Indies. These differences support the hypothesis of a migration from South America. By contrast, Budinoff (1991) has found that the human skeletal material associated with Saladoid and Ostionoid pottery at the Maisabel site in Puerto Rico is essentially the same, which indicates local development within the Antilles.

Linguists have assigned the language of the Tainos in the northern part of the West Indies and that of the Igneris and Island-Caribs in the southern part to the Arawakan family and have concluded that the two diverged from Proto-Northern, a previous member of the language family. They have reason to believe that the Proto-Northern language was present in the Orinoco basin at the time when the Saladero series was there and that it spread into the West Indies and diverged into the Taino and Igneri/Island-Carib languages while the Saladoid peoples were expanding there and evolving through the Ostionoid series into the Taino ethnic group. Hence, two independent sets of conclusions, based respectively upon physical anthropological and linguistic research, mutually support the culturally based hypotheses of Saladoid migration and Ostionoid development (Rouse 1986, 120–156).

Linguists have traced the ancestry of the Taino language farther back into the central part of the Amazon basin. Donald Lathrap (1970) has been inspired by this conclusion to search for ceramic evidence that the ancestral cultures also came from there. Other archaeologists, mindful of the fact that languages and cultures often come from different places, have cited contrary evidence favoring an origin of the ancestral cultures in the Andes (Rouse 1992, Fig. 7). Neither argument is conclusive, no chronological research has yet been done along either route, and little is known about the nonceramic aspects of the local cultures.

Attempts to trace the ancestry of the Island-Caribs back from their homeland in the southern part of the Lesser Antilles to the Guianas have likewise been inconclusive. Members of that ethnic group told the European colonists that they had come from the mainland, but archaeologists have been unable to confirm that statement because they have not yet succeeded in identifying Island-Carib remains. The archaeologists’ procedure may have been faulty. They have assumed that the arrival of the Caribs was a movement of peoples and their cultures, to be studied in the same way as the arrival of the Saladoid peoples, when it may instead have been a movement of immigrant social groups to be studied by the methods of sociocultural rather than culture-historical research. Carib war parties may have invaded the Windward Islands but have been too small in number to have been able to replace the previous Igneri population, and they may have become assimilated in that population, adopting its language and much of its culture.

There is some reason to believe that the ancestors of the Guanahatabeys came from Middle America (Rouse 1992, 20–22). Oliver (1989) has traced the Caquetio Indians of northwestern Venezuela back to the central part of the Orinoco Valley. Research on the fate of the Caribbean Indians during the historic age remains to be considered. This subject especially interests the inhabitants of the Spanish-speaking countries because many of them are descended from the Tainos. Most early Spanish colonists were men who obtained wives by marrying Taino women, and as a result, their offspring are racially, linguistically, and culturally mixed.

Students of the subject have been primarily concerned with the survival of biological, linguistic, and cultural traits into the historic age (e.g., García Arévalo 1988) and their spread to other parts of the world (Crosby 1972). Because the Tainos were the first Native Americans to have intensive contact with Europeans and Africans, they are the source of a large number of the New World traits that spread to the Old World, such as corn (maize), sweet potatoes, tobacco, rubber, and rubber-ball games. Many of the names for these items come from the Tainos. Conversely, the Tainos bore the brunt of the introduction of Old World diseases into the New World. This fact, combined with their intermarriage with the colonists, caused them to become extinct only decades after the arrival of Columbus, and as a result, it has been difficult to find Taino sites dating from the historic age (Rouse 1992, 138–172).