The descendants of the British, Danish, Dutch, and French colonists who settled alongside the Spaniards in the northern part of the West Indies are less interested in their Taino predecessors because the latter had disappeared before they arrived. These people prefer to study the remains of their own ancestors. In Jamaica, where the present population is almost entirely African-American, much work is being done on the slave quarters on sugar plantations and on the dwelling sites of escaped slaves.

Conditions are different in the Windward Islands, which are closer to South America. For several centuries after the extinction of the Tainos, the Island-Caribs continued to live there on islands not yet colonized by Europeans. So far, attempts to locate their remains have been unsuccessful.

While conserving the ruins of the first European settlement in South America, at Nueva Cadiz on Cubagua Island, Venezuela, Cruxent identified and excavated the quarter occupied by Indian slaves the Spaniards had brought there to dive for pearls (Rouse and Cruxent 1963, 134–138). The Indian quarters in the mission sites of Martinique, Trinidad, and Venezuela have received less attention. The subject does not greatly interest the modern inhabitants of those places because they do not trace their descent from the aborigines.

Sociocultural Research

On the final level of interpretation, Caribbeanists have shifted their attention from the peoples who produced the local cultures to the societies who used them (Watters 1976, 6). In doing so, they have focused on the societies’ activities.

These scholars have been attracted to the study of societies by the presence of chiefdoms among the Tainos in the Greater Antilles and the Caquetios in western Venezuela (Spencer and Redmond 1992; Wilson 1990). Indeed, the term chief comes from the Taino language. The remains of the Tainos and their ancestors provide an opportunity to examine the rise of chiefdoms in isolation, uninfluenced by direct contact with previously developed chiefdoms or states.

Bernardo Vega (1980) once tried to trace the boundaries of the Taino chiefdoms by correlating them with the limits of the latest archaeologically defined peoples and cultures in Hispaniola, but he had little success. The two kinds of units appear to have had different distributions and to equate them is like treating apples as oranges.

Better results have been achieved by using the direct historical method, that is, by deriving models of the Taino chiefdoms from the ethnohistoric evidence and projecting the models back into prehistory along the Tainos’ ancestral line. The historic chiefdoms consisted of relatively large groups of villages, each with its own chief, that owed allegiance to hierarchies of district and regional chiefs (Wilson 1990). The historic chiefdoms were also marked by ceremonial centers (i.e., clusters of ball and dance courts), elaborate burials, special types of ornaments, and intensive trade. Study of the spatial and temporal distribution of these criteria in the Greater Antilles during prehistoric time indicates that the local chiefdoms began to evolve during the late ceramic age and reached maturity in the formative age (Fig. 2).

Citing archaeological evidence that Bahamian villages were divided into halves, Keegan and Maclachlan (1989, 615–616) have theorized that if and when these halves split apart and became separate villages, they may have retained their affiliations and, as a result, have come to be ruled by district chiefs. The two scholars note that the Spaniards encountered such an incipient chiefdom on Aklin Island in the southern Bahamas and hypothesize that continued evolution farther south in Hispaniola would have led to the emergence there of regional chiefs and, hence, of the full chiefdoms encountered by Columbus.

The probability that their conclusions are correct is heightened by the fact that they obtained them by working within the direct line of ancestry of the Tainos as established on the previous, culture-historical level of interpretation. Without knowledge of this ancestry, the sociocultural researchers would have been prone to error. For example, in a separate study Keegan (1992, 17–18) assumed that the Dominican Republic sequence of Musiepedro (also known as