The Taíno were the Indigenous peoples in most of the West Indies, in the Caribbean region of the Americas. Their culture has been continued today by their descendants and by Taíno revivalist communities. They were the first New World peoples encountered by non-Norse Europeans. Part of the Arawak group of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Taíno are also referred to as Island Arawaks or Antillean Arawaks.
Extending from the Lucayan Archipelago of The Bahamas through the Greater Antilles of Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico to Guadeloupe in the northern Lesser Antilles, or the Leeward Islands, the Taíno historically lived in agricultural societies ruled by caciques with fixed settlements under a matrilineal system of kinship and inheritance, and a religion centered on the worship of zemis. At the time of European contact, they shared land with older Indigenous inhabitants, namely the Guanajatabeyes in Cuba, and the Ciguayos and the Macorix in Hispaniola, and they were engaged in conflict with the recent Carib settlers of the southern Lesser Antilles, or the Windward Islands.
The Taíno historically spoke an Arawakan language. Granberry and Vescelius (2004) recognise two varieties of the Taino language: "Classical Taino", spoken in Puerto Rico and most of Hispaniola, and "Ciboney Taino", spoken in the Bahamas, most of Cuba, western Hispaniola, and Jamaica. These Indigenous peoples did not refer to themselves originally as Taíno; the term was first explicitly used in this sense by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836.
Historically, anthropologists and historians asserted that the Taíno were no longer extant centuries ago, or that they gradually merged into a common identity with African and Hispanic cultures. Scholarly attitudes to Taíno survival and resurgence began to change around the 21st century. Many people today identify as Taíno, and many more have Taíno descent, most notably in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. A substantial number of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, and Dominicans have Indigenous mitochondrial DNA, which may suggest Taíno descent through the direct female line, especially in Puerto Rico. While some communities describe an unbroken cultural heritage passed down through the generations, often in secret, others are revivalist communities who seek to incorporate Taíno culture into their lives.
Terminology
Taíno is not a universally accepted denomination—it was not the name the Indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles called themselves historically, and there is uncertainty about the attributes and territorial boundaries of the Taíno among scholars who use the term. Historians disagree whether the peoples now referred to as Taíno were a singular group or multiple, distinct groups. The islanders that Christopher Columbus encountered either did not have a self-designation or Columbus did not record it, simply referring to them as "Indians". The peoples who inhabited most of the Greater Antilles when Europeans arrived were first called Taínos by Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1836. In his Historia de las Indias, Bartolomé de las Casas uses specific terms like "Lucayos" and "cibonéyes" to refer to Indigenous peoples and languages in the Bahamas and Cuba. In Hispaniola, Las Casas notes at least 3 languages including Lower Macorix, Upper Macorix, and a lingua franca understood across the island whose main dialect was Xaraguá.
In 1871, early ethnohistorian Daniel Garrison Brinton referred to the Taíno people as the Island Arawak, because of their connections with the Lokono (Arawaks) of the mainland and because the Taíno language was part of the Arawakan language family. Scholars and writers continued to refer to the Indigenous group as Arawaks, Island Arawaks, or Antillean Arawaks until the 1990s. According to Brinton, the lingua franca spoken in Hispaniola had been the subject of "strange and wild theorizing among would-be philologists" and that it was Rafinesque who "christened it the "Taino" language".
Contemporary scholars such as Irving Rouse and Basil Reid have concluded the Taíno developed a distinct language and culture from the Lokono of South America. As such, many modern historians, linguists, and anthropologists now use the term Taíno to refer to all the formerly Island Arawak nations except the Kalinago (Island Caribs), who are not seen as belonging to the same people. Rouse classifies all inhabitants of the Greater Antilles as Taíno (except those from the western tip of Cuba and small pockets of Hispaniola), as well as those of the Lucayan Archipelago and the northern Lesser Antilles. Modern groups with Caribbean-Indigenous heritage have also reclaimed the exonym Taíno as a self-descriptor, although terms such as Neo-Taino or Indio are also used.
Rouse also subdivides the historic Taíno into three main groups:
Classic Taíno in most of Hispaniola and all of Puerto Rico. Western Taíno, or sub-Taíno in Hispaniola, most of Cuba, Jamaica, and the Lucayan archipelago. Eastern Taíno in the northern Lesser Antilles from the Virgin Islands to Guadeloupe.
Basil has also written that there is controversy about whether or not the Indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles referred to themselves as Taíno, noting the existence of substantial cultural and linguistic differences between groups labelled as Taíno. Basil considers a unified notion of a "simple Arawak culture" to be overemphasized and states that while "the jury is still out" on whether Taíno is a historically accurate term, it will continue to be used by archaeologists "until they find a better alternative". The archaeologist José Oliver also writes that terms like Taíno and Carib are "problematic conceptual and definitional categories", use of which "disguises and misrepresents a diversity of identities and practices" among Indigenous peoples of the Greater Antilles. Oliver continues to use the term for convenience, despite its "problematic conceptual baggage".
The archaeologist L. Antonio Curet notes that "Despite its widespread use in academic and popular publications, the use of the term Taíno has not gone without criticism or opposition" and that academics since at least 1897 have been "criticizing its use and questioning its scientific basis and value and suggested using instead names such as siboneyes, haytianos, jamaiquinos, and borinqueños that were more related to actual terms used by the natives to refer to the islands," largely "because it has no true anthropological or historical meaning and it tends to homogenize a large number of groups with different identities." Gabriel de la Luz-Rodríguez, a professor at the University of Puerto Rico, argues that what he calls "the invention of the Taíno" was an aspect of "colonial rhetoric" emerging from early modern European writers. According to Luz-Rodríguez, the scholar Adriana Lewis-Galanes also considered Taíno a concept "invented by Europeans in order to refer to a diverse constellation" of Indigenous peoples in the Greater Antilles.
The researcher Jorge Estevez has written that the term Taíno is "highly controversial" and that while some "maintain that “Taíno” is indeed the tribal name of the most dominant Indigenous group of the Caribbean", he considers this claim "difficult to back up, since the people we call Taíno today were not one ethnic group, but rather composites of many different Indigenous, Arawakan-speaking peoples" who had mixed across geography and time in the Caribbean. However, Estevez believes the "modern name Taíno and its historical variants, “nitayno” or “tayno,” were the words the Indigenous peoples of the region used to identify themselves Caribbean-wide and are, indeed, applicable".
Etymology Taíno derives from the term nitaino or nitayno, which referred to an elite social class, not an ethnic group. According to José Barreiro, the word Taíno directly translates as "men of the good". 16th-century Spanish documents do not use the word to refer to the tribal affiliation or ethnicity of the Natives of the Greater Antilles; the word tayno or taíno, with the meaning "good" or "prudent", was mentioned twice in an account of Christopher Columbus's second voyage by his physician, Diego Álvarez Chanca, while in Guadeloupe. José R. Oliver writes that the Natives of Borinquén, who had been captured by the Caribs of Guadeloupe and who wanted to escape on Spanish ships to return home to Puerto Rico, used the term to indicate that they were the "good men", as opposed to the Caribs.
According to Peter Hulme, the word taíno was probably used by Columbus's sailors, not by the islanders who greeted them. The sailors may have been saying the only word they knew in a Native Caribbean tongue, or were perhaps indicating to the "commoners" on the shore that they were taíno—i.e., important people from elsewhere and thus entitled to deference. If taíno was being used to denote ethnicity, then the Spanish sailors were using it to indicate they were "not Carib" themselves.
Origins
Taíno culture as documented is believed to have developed in the Caribbean. The Taíno creation story says they emerged from caves in a sacred mountain on present-day Hispaniola. Scholars have developed two theories to explain the origin of the Indigenous Caribbean people:
One group of scholars contends that the Taíno's ancestors were Arawak speakers from the centre of the Amazon Basin, as indicated by linguistic, cultural, and ceramic evidence. They migrated to the Orinoco Valley on the north coast, before reaching the Caribbean by way of what is now Venezuela into Trinidad, migrating along the Lesser Antilles to Cuba and The Bahamas. Evidence that supports the theory includes the tracing of the ancestral cultures of these people to the Orinoco Valley and their languages to the Amazon Basin.Rouse, pp. 30–48. The alternate theory, known as the circum-Caribbean theory, contends that the Taíno's ancestors diffused from the Colombian Andes. Julian H. Steward, who originated this concept, suggests a migration from the Andes to the Caribbean and a parallel migration into Central America and the Guianas, Venezuela, and the Amazon Basin of South America.
DNA studies have suggested that the historic Taíno descended from "a wave of pottery-making farmers" known as the Ceramic Age people, who entered the Caribbean from the northeastern coast of South America 2,500 years ago. There they encountered the earlier Archaic Age people who had arrived "some 6,000 or 7,000 years ago" from Central and South America. Ancestry studies suggest the Taíno and these earlier Indigenous populations did not often intermarry—supporting earlier theories that the Ceramic Age people supplanted the Archaic Age people—but newer evidence suggests Archaic Age people may have survived until around 900CE in western Cuba.
In Puerto Rico, 21st-century studies indicate that a high proportion of people have Amerindian mtDNA, likely as a result of intermarriage during the early part of European colonisation. A small group of Taíno may also have survived in the mountains at Indiera Alta. DNA analysis suggests Puerto Ricans' Indigenous ancestry may derive from both the Ceramic Age people and the earlier Archaic Age people. The authors conclude that "a strong non-Amazonian contribution to the Taíno gene pool cannot be discarded from the data". Archaeological evidence, particularly pottery, also suggests that Taíno groups in Puerto Rico and Hispaniola may have had both Ceramic and Archaic origins.Keegan, William F. "Archaic influences in the origins and development of Taino societies." Caribbean Journal of Science 42, no. 1 (2006): 1.Sinelli, Peter T. "Meillacoid and the Origins of Classic Taino Society." The Oxford Handbook of Caribbean Archaeology (2013): 221-231.
Society