"The Lucayans:  The People Whom Columbus Discovered in the
Bahamas"
 
by:   George A. Aarons
 
in:   "Five Hundred" Magazine  (April 1990, Vol. 2, No. 1,
pp. 6-7)
 
      When Columbus, the great admiral and navigator, arrived at
San Salvador in the Bahamas on October 12, 1492, he found there a
group of people known to us as the Lucayans.  It was at this
juncture that the 15th century inhabitants of the Bahamas entered
written history.  But their history, as can today be pieced
together through archaeological, anthropological, ethnographical
and historical research, actually predates this momentous event
by many centuries.
      It is believed that the ancestors of all (or at least the
overwhelming majority) of the people present in the Western
Hemisphere on that epic day almost five centuries ago, crossed
over the then solid Bering Straits.  They moved between what is
now Siberia and Alaska during a particularly cold period some 40-
60,000 years ago.  By 20,000 years ago they had spread throughout
the contiguous continents of North and South America, and by
5,000 B.C., their descendants had penetrated into some of the
islands of the Caribbean Sea.  By 500 B.C., waves of migration of
an Arawakan-speaking people, whose ancestral home had been the
great river basins of northern South America, began to venture
out into the Caribbean Sea, threading through the islands of the
Eastern Caribbean.  Two hundred years later, these Taino peoples,
commonly today called Arawaks, had colonized Puerto Rico and by
A.D. 500, had probably settled in all of the Greater Antilles,
supplanting, in at least some of these islands, the vestiges of
the descendants of older migrants.
      By 600 A.D., probably because of the joint impulses of
population pressure and trade, the Taino from Hispaniola began to
colonize the islands to the north--the Bahamas.  Probably com-
mencing with Great Inagua, by A.D. 1492, they had settled at
least all the major islands of the Bahamian archipelago, by which
time they had evolved a culture both similar and dissimilar in
some respects to their Taino relatives in the Greater Antilles to
the south.  These were the first Bahamians--the Lucayans--who at
the end of October, 1492 guided Columbus through their archi-
pelago, well known to them through trade and food resource
exploitation, to the Greater Antilles to the south, with whose
inhabitants they maintained trade and other relations.
      At least 50,000 strong in 1492, within a century they would
suffer nearly complete annihilation.  Today there is no one
living who can truly claim to have Lucayan ancestry.  The
horrible death toll can be accounted for by the presence of the
early Spanish and other Old World colonists, who carried many of
the Lucayans from the archipelago to Hispaniola and Cuba in
chains, and unconsciously passed on diseases to the Lucayans, who
had little or no immunity, with fatal consequences.  A culture
and a pattern of life had forever been destroyed.
      Like all the Tainos of the Caribbean, the Lucayans were
governed by hereditary caciques (chiefs) who had both temporal
and religious duties.  Each cacique was responsible for a
specific area, and each island probably had more than one
caciquedom.  The Lucayans, who exploited both land and sea for
their food, lived in villages in the Bahamas, in close proximity
to the sea.  The population of villages varied in number from a
few individuals to many hundreds.
      The homes of the ordinary families, the caneyes, were
roughly circular made from thatch and wooden posts with a high
cone-like roof, no windows and one door, large enough to accom-
modate a nuclear family that spent most of the time outdoors. 
The houses of the caciques (the bohios) were generally larger and
rectangular and would be associated spatially with community
facilities, which might take the form of a ball court for playing
batos (a type of jai-alai) or a ceremonial plaza.  The Lucayan
bed was a hammock (hamaca), and the floors of their houses were
of a beaten flattened clay.
      Within the Lucayan family there was division of labor.  The
men generally hunted food from land and sea, made their tools and
weapons and built the canoes.  The women farmed, made cloth,
baked the pottery and looked after the children.  Both men and
women participated in house construction and the areitos (songs
and dances), which added to the joy of life.  Tobacco (cohiba)
was smoked through a fork-shaped nose-pipe and alcoholic
beverages were made from fermented cassava and other roots.
      The Lucayans were pantheists who believed in a heaven
(Coyaba) where all would go after death, and which they thought
was located somewhere to the south.  They had a series of gods,
which they called Cemies, whose spirits they believed were
embodied in the physical being of certain members of the animal
kingdom familiar to them.  For this reason they decorated their
ceramics and other objects made from bone, stone, wood, clay and
shell with the features of these animals.  The Lucayans desig-
nated special sacred places for ceremonial and religious
purposes.  These were sometimes a small hut placed outside of the
settlement or caves in the vicinity of their villages, in which
they would place sacred objects such as the carved wooden seats
of the caciques (dujos) or where they would carve images
(petroglyphs) on the wall of the caves.  Because one aspect of
their religious beliefs revolved around ancestor worship, they
would often place in their caneyes bones of their ancestors, as
well as Cemies carved from bone, stone, wood or shell, modeled in
clay or made from botanical fibers.  The Lucayans also had great
respect for their dead, placing them in caves, sink-holes and
sometimes also in blue holes filled with water.
      Physically, the Lucayan Tainos resembled their Taino rela-
tives of the Greater Antilles.  On the average, they were shorter
than the modern Bahamian population and said to be generally slim
and well-built.  In complexion, they were a light copper color
and had dark straight hair, which generally was cut in a fringe
at the front and left long in back.  The foreheads of all Lucayan
babies were flattened soon after birth, as the Lucayans believed
that this improved the appearance and increased intelligence. 
They were described as being pleasing of face and well-
proportioned.  For special occasions, such as areitos and
religious ceremonies, they would decorate themselves with body
paint made from an assortment of vegetable dyes and other organic
materials.  The Lucayan men wore a type of cotton loin cloth, arm
and leg bands made from cotton, and jewelry made from bone,
stone, wood, shell and clay.  The Lucayan women wore a type of
cotton mantle or skirt, which was elongated once puberty was
achieved, as well as assorted jewelry also made from bone, stone,
wood, shell and clay.  In all probability, whenever it was
available through trade, they would also wear on their bodies
jewelry made from gold, jade or obsidian, not available locally
in the coralline bahamian archipelago.
      The assemblage of weapons, tools, implements and musical
instruments utilized by the Lucayans were all made from bone,
stone, shell, wood, organic fibers and clay.  Among this collec-
tion were objects made from serpentine or jadeite, igneous rocks
whose source would often have been the volcanic Greater Antilles. 
From this, apart from more utilitarian objects, were also made a
variety of petaloid celts, some so beautifully executed that they
can only be describes as cult or trade objects.  Also made out of
hard stone were manos (rolling pins) and metates (three or four
footed stool-like objects, usually highly decorated and used for
grinding meal).  The Lucayans also made canoes of various sizes
from the trunks of cotton trees, some of which attained lengths
of up to thirty meters.
      Perhaps the most familiar reminders of the Lucayans today
are the ceramics which they made and used.  The ceramics of the
Lucayans have been classified as Palmettan Ostionoid, as they
relate to the Ostionoid complex of ceramics which originated in
the Greater Antilles, and of which the wares of the Lucayans
represent a subseries.  The Lucayan Palmettan tempered with
shell, predominantly that of the queen conch (Strombus gigas) was
generally brown in color.  It was both plain and decorated, and a
number of different decorative patterns have been recognized. 
Apart from cooking pots and serving vessels the Lucayans also
made wide, oval, thick-bodied griddles on which they ground
organic foods.
      It is clear that the Lucayans had a complex society.  Until
the arrival of the peoples of the Old World, their only natural
enemies were the so-called Caribs who had a far more martial
lifestyle and dwelt in the islands to the southeast.  Sadly, the
Lucayans no longer live amongst us but their spirit, embodied in
the verbal and material heritage they have left behind, will
never cease to capture our imaginations.  It is fitting that they
should have their rightful place when we celebrate Columbus'
first encounter with them on a beach, on one of the islands of
the Bahamas archipelago, almost five hundred years ago.
 
 
                                                           AARONS01.ART