The Taíno of the Greater Antilles

Arawakan-speaking farmers and seafarers carried the culture the Spanish would call Taíno - from their own word for 'good' or 'noble' - from the Orinoco basin up the island chain, reaching the Bahamas by about the eighth century. They built towns of thousands around ceremonial plazas, played the rubber-ball game batey in walled courts like those at Caguana, and carved zemís, figures that held the presence of ancestors and spirits. In October 1492 they were the first people in the Americas to meet Columbus, and the first to be fed into his economy: within two decades, gold-dust quotas, encomienda labor (the Spanish system that granted colonists the forced labor of a district's people), famine and smallpox had collapsed the population of the largest islands.

1. c. 500 BCArawakan-speaking potters and farmers move up the Antilles from the Orinoco region; their descendants become the peoples later called Taíno.
2. 1492Columbus makes landfall on Guanahani in the Bahamas; the Taíno are the first Americans he meets - and the first he enslaves.
3. 1511Agüeybaná II's men drown Diego Salcedo to test Spanish claims of immortality; Borikén rises in revolt.
4. 1512Hatuey, who fled Hispaniola to warn Cuba, is burned at the stake; las Casas makes his death the emblem of the destruction of the Indies.
5. 1836Naturalist Constantine Rafinesque coins 'Taíno' as a scholarly name for the islands' first peoples, from their word for 'good' or 'noble'.
6. 1998Descendant communities found the United Confederation of Taíno People, carrying Caribbean Indigenous testimony to the United Nations.
7. 2018A genome from a Lucayan woman, a thousand years old: her closest known relatives are today's Arawakan speakers of northern South America, and present-day Puerto Ricans are genetically closer to her than any other population in the study

The conuco - a mound garden of cassava, sweet potato, maize, beans, squash, peppers, peanuts and tobacco - turned thin tropical soils into permanent fields. Cassava bread, baked from grated and detoxified bitter yuca, kept for months and fed whole fleets. Taíno fishers worked nets, weirs and suckerfish lines, and navigators read stars, currents and the flight of birds between islands; they knew the storm season so well that Juracán, their name for its force, became the word 'hurricane' in every European language.

Descendant identity is organized and growing. The United Confederation of Taíno People, founded in 1998, represents communities from Borikén, Kiskeia, Bimini and the diaspora at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues - pressing on hurricane recovery, toxic military waste on Vieques and Culebra, and luxury development on sacred sites like Caguana. In 2022 its representatives announced the first Classic Taíno Dictionary and Grammar Guide: a language written off for four centuries, taught again.