"Whom Did Columbus Discover in the West Indies?" by: Irving Rouse in: "American Archeology" (Vol. 6, No. 2, 1987) A ship's captain with an interest in Caribbean prehistory once asked me why that area happens to be named after the Carib Indians of the Lesser Antilles, whom Columbus did not meet until his second voyage, rather than the inhabitants of the Bahamas and the Greater antilles, whom he discovered during his first voyage. The latter population was larger, more advanced, and it played a much more central role in the discovery of the New World, as the following papers illustrate. The captain was perceptive. His question points up a significant difference between the two populations that has not received the attention it deserves. The people of the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles had no general name, which could be applied to the region in which they lived. Instead, they referred to themselves as residents of a particular locality or a specific chiefdom. Thus, the Indians of the Bahamas called themselves Lucayos, that is, "inhabitants of the small islands," and the inhabitants of the southwestern part of Hispaniola belonged to the chiefdom of Xaragua Zayas y Alfonso. On the contrary, the bulk of the population in the Lesser Antilles did have an overall name, which could be, and was, applied to the whole region discovered by Columbus. The admiral was told about the Caribs when he reached Hispaniola during his first voyage and followed a more southerly route during his second voyage in order to investigate the tale, which he was able to confirm upon landing in Guadeloupe. Subsequent explorers discovered other Indians calling themselves Caribs (or Calinas) in the more southerly islands and in the Guianas (Loven 1935:51-8). Why this difference in nomenclature? To judge from linguis- tic and archeological research, the inhabitants of the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles had lived there so long that they had forgotten their origin. They thought of themselves only in terms of their current situation. The natives of the Lesser Antilles, on the other hand, remembered that their territory had been invaded by war parties from the south (the mainland?) shortly before the arrival of Columbus. These parties are presumed to have conquered the natives and to have imposed their own name Carib upon them (Taylor and Hoff 1980). In the absence of a general name for the population of the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles, linguists and archeologists doing research on that population have had to develop their own nomenclature for it. They have also had to take it into con- sideration that the inhabitants of the far end of Cuba, from Havana to the Yucatan Channel, were relicts of a previous popula- tion, which spoke a different language and had a different way of life than the rest of the islanders. The experts have applied a variety of terms to this relict: Guanajatabey, Ciboney, and Archaic (Loven 1935:3-25, Alegria 1981:4-9). Unfortunately, none of these terms has gained general acceptance. The remainder of the Indians encountered by Columbus in the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles appear to have shared a single language and similar customs, although with some local variation. The experts have coined two different names for this population, one of which has become prevalent in the former British colonies and the other on the Spanish- and French-speaking islands, including Puerto Rico. In the British West Indies the population is called Arawak and in the Spanish and French West Indies, Taino (cf. Olsen 1974 with Comision Nacional para la Celebracion del V Centenario del Descubrimiento de America 1983). This difference in terminology needs to be reconciled. Even the name Carib has cause trouble. Linguists have found that the Indians of that name in the Lesser Antilles spoke a language belonging to the Arawakan rather than the Cariban family, with which the mainland Caribs were affiliated (de Goeje 1938). From a linguistic point of view, therefore, the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles have as much right to be called Arawaks as the natives of the Greater Antilles. Ethnic vs. Scientific Nomenclature The foregoing problems of terminology may be resolved by applying to the human history of the Caribbean area a distinction made in studying its natural history, between popular and scien- tific names. The Swedish naturalist Linnaeus recognized in the eighteenth century that the popular names for wild plants and animals are too variable, too incomplete, and too unsystematic to serve the needs of science. He developed a binomial nomenclature for use in scientific research. Anthropologists are beginning to realize that the names which people apply to themselves have a similar weakness. Popular names, which are termed ethnic (Allaire 1977), need to be replaced in scientific discourse by more systematic nomen- clatures. Linnaeus' binomial system partially fills this need. Biological anthropologists have been able to assign the oldest human finds to extinct species such as Homo erectus. And they are able to divide our own species, Homo sapiens, into races, each defined by a different set of genetic traits, that is, by a different morphology (e.g., Garn 1965). But the Linnaean classification does not go far enough. It is designed to cover only wild plants and animals, which lack true cultures and languages. Human beings must be classified not only in terms of their genetic traits, as wildlife is, but also in terms of their linguistic and cultural traits. They need to be divided into speech communities, each marked by a different language, and peoples, each with a different culture, as well as into species and races, defined by their morphology. The members of a species or race remain in it until they die, because their genetic traits are inherent in their bodies. But persons can leave the speech community into which they were born by emigrating to the territory of another speech community and learning its language, and they can affiliate with another people by settling in the latter's territory and adopting its culture. Consequently, speech communities and peoples are not definable by the origins of their individual members. On the contrary, ethnic groups often use their members' origins as a means of defining themselves. They also employ combinations of morphological, linguistic, and cultural traits; and the importance they attach to each kind of trait varies from group to group. It is this lack of consistency in the choice of criteria that makes the names for ethnic groups unscientific. Ideally, human scientists, like natural scientists, should restrict their use of ethnic names to the groups from which they obtain and should develop separate nomenclatures for the groups that they themselves define in terms of race, language, or culture. This is the procedure normally in the study of prehis- toric species and races, speech communities, and peoples, if only because the names by which these groups designing themselves are unknown (Rouse 1972). The comparable scientific groups of historic time, however, are usually named after ethnic groups believed to typify them. Whenever one uses ethnic terminology in this manner, one should be careful to specify the kind or kinds of scientifically defined groups to which one is transferring each ethnic name (Rouse 1986, Chaps. 5,6). Here, I shall discuss the use of ethnic names to designate the linguistic and cultural groups that have been identified in the West Indies. Racial groups cannot be included because none has yet been distinguished. I shall cover only the deep-sea islands, that is, the Lesser Antilles, the Greater Antilles, and the Bahamas. Trinidad and Tobago, which lie on the continental shelf just off the coast of South America, are excluded because they are geographically a part of South America rather that the West Indies. Speech Communities and Their Languages three speech communities are known to have inhabited the deep-sea islands in the time of Columbus: Guanajatabey, Taino, and Island-Carib. The Guanajatabey speakers were the survivors of an earlier population who lived on the western end of Cuba. The Taino speakers occupied the Bahamas and the rest of the Greater Antilles, and the Island-Carib speakers lived in the central and southern part of the Lesser Antilles. It is not clear whether the inhabitants of the northern third of the Lesser Antilles spoke Taino, Island-Carib, or a separate language. The three known speech communities and their languages will be discussed in turn. Guanajatabey. This name is the one which the natives of the far end of Cuba applied to themselves. We know that they con- stituted a separate speech community because Columbus' inter- preter was unable to understand their language. Unfortunately, the Guanajatabeys became extinct before they could be studied, and hence it has been impossible to learn the nature and affiliation of their language (Loven 1935:3 ff.). The word Ciboney is frequently used in place of Guanajatabey. It has to be rejected in this context because it is derived from the name for an ethnic group in central Cuba that spoke the Taino language (Alegria 1981:5-6). Archaic is even less appropriate. It refers to culture rather than language, and will be discussed below in that connection. There is no such thing as a Ciboney or an Archaic language. Taino. It is clear that almost all the remaining inhabitants of the Bahamas and the Greater Antilles belonged to a single speech community. Spanish writers reported that the natives of these islands spoke a single language (Taylor 1977:17- 18) and Columbus was able to use the same interpreter almost everywhere he went. Too little is known about the few exceptions to determine whether they are due to dialectic difference or to the intrusion of foreign speech communities (Loven 1935:46). Since the members of the dominant speech community lacked a name for themselves, linguists have had to coin one. Rafinesque (1836) proposed Taino, an adjective meaning "good" or "noble," because members of the speech community used it to indicate to the Spanish explorers that they were not Caribs. This name has been adopted by most continental scholars and by the residents of their former colonies (e.g., Alegria 1981:14-17)/ Brinton (1871) handled the problem differently. He named the Bahamian-Greater Antillean speech community Island Arawak, choosing the adjective island to indicate the community's geo- graphical position and the noun Arawak because of his discovery that the island language was related to one spoken by the Arawaks, an ethnic group that is now confined to the Guianas but formerly extended into Venezuela and Trinidad (Boomert 1985). Unfortunately, subsequent authors dropped the adjective Island, thus creating the false impression in the minds of uninformed readers that the "Arawaks" of the islands belonged to the same speech community as the true Arawaks on the mainland. It seems advisable, as in the natural sciences, to give priority to the name first proposed, which in this case is Taino. That name is also to be preferred because it indicates clearly that the islanders spoke a different language than the main- landers. Taino has the further advantage that it is only once removed from its origin; it has been transferred from its use for a mainland ethnic group's language to the family in the Greater Antilles (i.e., Taino), and finally, to the people who spoke the language (i.e., the Taino speech community). For all these reasons, linguists now prefer to apply the name Taino to the island speech community and its language. Most also prefer to call the modern form of its mainland counterpart Lokono rather than Arawak, in order to avoid any possibility of confusion (Taylor 1977:17-23). Island-Carib. At first glance the name Island-Carib might appear to have the same three weaknesses as Island Arawak. In fact, it has none of them. So far as I am aware, it was the first name proposed for the Lesser Antillean speech community. Linguists have carefully preserved the adjective Island. (I follow their practice of hyphenating the name in order to em- phasize this point.) And Carib is only once removed from its original ethnic usage. To be sure Island-Carib does predispose the uninformed reader to assume that the language so named belongs to the Cariban family when in fact it was Arawakan. But this drawback can be avoided if writers specify whether they are applying the name to the ethnic group discovered by Columbus or to the speech group established by linguists. One should also be careful to distinguish the name of the language from the name of its family by adding the suffix -an to the latter (Rouse 1986, Chap. 5). If the origin tradition noted at the outset is to be believed, Cariban-speaking warriors from the mainland conquered the inhabitants of the central and southern parts of the Lesser Antilles, who were known as Igneris, and adopted the latters' Arawakan language, just as the Normans who invaded England shifted from French to the local language. The Carib warriors also brought with them a pidgin language, which they continued to speak in separate mens' houses (Taylor and Hoff 1980). People and Their Cultures Since the major boundaries of the distribution of the peoples and cultures discovered by Columbus coincide with the linguistic boundaries, I shall follow the usual practice of applying the linguistic terms to them, but with some modifica- tions in detail based upon the most recent archeological finds. Guanajatabey. The first cultural group appears to have coincided with the ethnic group that went by the name Guanajatabey and with the linguistic group to which that name has been applied. This was to be expected if the joint groups had survived from an earlier, more widespread population. The Guanajatabey people and their culture became extinct before they could be studied, but Indians living in other parts of Cuba told the conquistadors that the Guanajatabeys were "savages having neither houses nor farms, subsisting on game captured in the mountains, or on turtles and fish," and added that they dwelt in caves (Cosculluela 1946:11). These reports have been confirmed by archeologists, who have also learned that the Guanajatabeys lacked pottery and were organized into mobile bands rather than sedentary villages. Archeologists have discovered that the extinct population of which the Guanajatabeys were a relict once extended over all of the West Indies. Harrington (1921) applied the name Ciboney to this population, not realizing that the Indians had used that name to refer to a part of the Taino speech community, and I repeated his error in my contribution to the Handbook of South American Indians (Rouse 1948:497-503). The term Archaic, which is used by Alegria (1981:4-9) among others, avoids this error, as does Preceramic, which I have substituted on occasion. However, both terms are too general; they refer to levels of development or ages that extended throughout the Americas (Willey and Phillips 1958). It is preferable in my opinion to correlate the Guanajatabey people and culture with the prehistoric series of peoples and cultures that I now call Redondan Casimiroid (Rouse 1986, Chap. 5). Taino. To judge from the accounts of Columbus and his contemporaries, all the Taino speakers had the same way of life, and hence it has become the practice to speak of a Taino people and culture as well as the Taino speech community and language (Alegria 1981:14-17). Archeological finds indicate that the Taino people and culture are divisible into two parts, classic Taino and sub-Taino. I shall here insert the adjective western before sub-Taino in order to allow for the possible existence of a third, eastern sub-Taino division outside the area known to have been inhabited by Taino speakers. The classic Tainos were situated in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, with outposts in central Cuba, the Turks and Caicos Islands--north of Hispaniola--and Vieques and St. Croix Islands-- east of Puerto Rico. The western sub-Tainos occupied the remain- der of the Bahamian archipelago, central Cuba, and Jamaica. The eastern sub-Tainos, if they existed, inhabited the rest of the Virgin Islands and the northern part of the Lesser Antilles, that is, the no-man's-land between the Taino and the Island-Carib speech communities. According to the historical records, the classic Tainos practiced a relatively advanced form of agriculture, lived in sedentary villages organized into hierarchical chiefdoms, built plazas on which they danced and played ball, and worshiped deities known as zemis in their houses and in cave shrines. They carved and engraved figures of the zemis and represented them on their household utensils. Archeological research has confirmed these reports (Alegria 1983). The sub-Tainos were less highly developed. They farmed more simply, lacked hierarchical chiefdoms, and produced less elaborate figures of zemis. Their territory has yielded none of the earth- and stone-lined plazas and ball courts that charac- terize the classic Tainos (ibid.). In the Handbook of South American Indians (Rouse 1948, Table 2), I classified the classic Tainos, the sub-Tainos, and the Ingeri population that preceded the Island-Caribs into an "Arawak" series of cultures. I now realize that this was a mistake. In effect, I removed the term Arawak one step further from its ethnic source and thus added to the confusion surround- ing that term. When archeologists began to distinguish prehis- toric cultural groups, I had no further need to use Arawak, for I was able to correlate the historic units with the prehistoric groups. In my latest publication (Rouse 1986, Chap. 5), I have equated the classic Tainos with the Chican Ostionoid series of prehistoric peoples and cultures and the western sub-Tainos with the Meillacan Ostionoid series. If the eastern sub-Taino cate- gory is valid, it correlates with the Elenan Ostionoid series. Island-Caribs. Here again, as in the case of the Guanajatabeys, an ethnic, a linguistic, and a cultural group coincide, and hence the same name can be applied to all three. The coincidence of the three supports the linguists' conclusion that Carib warriors from the mainland invaded the Lesser Antilles, conquered the previous Igneri population, and replaced its name with theirs, while at the same time adopting the Igneris' language. Unfortunately, archeologists have failed in repeated attempts to test this hypothesis; they have not yet been able to reach agreement on the identification of Island-Carib remains (ibid.). The Island-Caribs were farmers and had independent villages like those of the sub-Tainos, except that theirs had separate men's houses. They emphasized warfare over the worship of zemis. The men raided the Tainos, stole their women, and, if the accounts of the time are to be believed, at the flesh of their captives. (Our word cannibal is derived from their name.) In the latter respects, they resembled their namesakes on the continent, with whom they traded. Conclusions The question posed in my title may be answered as follows. Most of the "Indians" discovered by Columbus had no general name for themselves. they are best called Tainos, which is the term chosen by scholars to refer to their language and their culture. The classic Tainos lived in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, the islands first settled by the Spaniards. Their neighbors in all directions--including the natives of the Bahamas and Jamaica who are discussed in this volume--are known as sub-Tainos. The term Arawak, which is substituted for Taino in the British West Indies, is a misnomer and should be abandoned. The Admiral discovered a second major population in the central and southern part of the Lesser Antilles. This popula- tion did have a name for itself and that name, Carib, is the source of our term for the entire region. Modern scholars prefer to call the population Island-Carib so as to avoid confusion with other Caribs on the mainland, who differed in language if not also in culture. In addition, Columbus had contact with the Guanajatabeys on the western end of Cuba, who were a relict of the original population of the islands. This ethnic group lived by hinting and fishing, was organized into bands rather than villages, and lacked pottery--not to mention the worship of zemis, which characterizes the Tainos, and warfare, for which the Caribs are best known. ROUSE-01.ART