The Tainos: Rise And Decline Of The People Who Greeted Columbus, by Irving Rouse

This book is one of those which was written in order to capitalize on the attention surrounding the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the New World [1], although this is not the sort of book that would appear to immediately appeal to a mass reading audience. This is not a fault of the book, which is an excellent book as a work on the archaeology of the Taino culture and a study of its origins as can be determined by linguistics and material remains. The book is an immensely dry one, although there are a lot of lessons in this book worth reflecting on, both when it comes to the distinction between the Spanish West Indies and the English, French, and Dutch West Indies as well as concerning the tragic irony of the Tainos facing genocide when they in fact inflicted it upon a previous people in the Caribbean. This book does not in any way minimize the horrors of the Island Caribs or the Spanish in their behavior, but it points out that the Tainos, as noble as they may have considered themselves, were certainly no angels either when it came to their own dealings with others, given their slow and steady extirpation of the aboriginal people of the Greater Antilles.

In terms of its organization and structure, this book is organized in a way that is both chronological and thematic. Its heavy use of archaeological jargon is somewhat counterbalanced by the fact that the book at least defines its terms in a lengthy glossary just before its lengthy endnotes. The book’s main contents, somewhat less than 200 pages in length, consist of seven six chapters and an epilogue. The first chapter introduces the setting of the West Indies, defined as the area between the Bahamas and Trinidad, as well as the Tainos themselves and their neighboring ethnic groups, one of which was markedly inferior in level of civilization and the other of which was immensely aggressive and militaristic. The second chapter examines the cultural, linguistic, and biological ancestry of the Tainos, going back to clues about the development of various pottery styles, the origin of certain religious beliefs, including the creepy demon worship and idolatry of the Tainos, and their linguistic origin as part of the Arawakan family, whose origins spring from the Amazon. The third chapter looks at the peopling of the West Indies, looking at the Casimiroid peoples, the somewhat backwards aboriginal people who apparently descended from the isthmus of Central America, as well as the even more backwards Arawakan Ortoiroid peoples who were stopped at the boundary between Puerto Rico and Hispanola for several centuries. The fourth chapter looks at the first repeopling, where the Saladoid peoples and their Ostionoid descendents overwhelmed the original Ortoiroid and most of the Casimiroid inhabitants and eventually controlled most of the West Indies, as can be seen from the historical record as well as the material one. The fifth chapter looks at the emergence of the Tainos among the Ostenoid peoples, showing how cultural boundaries witnessed by Columbus match with the boundaries of various pottery styles. The sixth chapter examines the voyages of Columbus, the Spanish conquest, and the eventual disappearance of the independent Taino and Island Carib chiefdoms. The short epilogue looks at the Tainos’ role in the Colombian exchange in biological, linguistic, and cultural traits, marking a difference between those areas where the Tainos formed part of the substratum of colonial society and those areas where they were extirpated altogether.

Although this book is dry reading, heavy with jargon, it is worthwhile on a variety of levels. For one, it points out that the importance of the Tainos in a practical sense depends in great deal on whether a population has any sort of connection with them or not. Additionally, the book is full of personal correspondence being referred to, reminding the reader that the world of Caribbean archaeology is a small one, where personal connections matter for a great deal when it comes to being able to cite research that has yet to be published. On top of this, the book reminds its readers that for far too long there has been a desire to pass the buck or to ignore certain questions or areas of exploration when it came to the origins of the Taino and how those can be determined, as well as the interaction between biology, society, and material culture. This is a book filled with information, with discussion of pottery and weapons, with a reminder of the human nature of the Tainos, with the artifacts of their idol-saturated worship, and with questions as to what happens when cultures collide, and what remains when the past is seemingly subsumed with barely a trace, where centuries go by before people start wondering what had happened beforehand.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2011/02/10/does-it-matter-who-discovered-america/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/07/11/book-review-1493/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/10/13/a-celebration-for-no-one/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/christopher-columbus-and-the-social-and-religious-motives-for-exploration/