Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico

by Karen F. Anderson-Córdova

Overview

Reveals the transformation that occurred in Indian communities during the Spanish conquest of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico from 1492 to 1550

In Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, Karen F. Anderson-Córdova draws on archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical sources to elucidate the impacts of sixteenth-century Spanish conquest and colonization on indigenous peoples in the Greater Antilles. Moving beyond the conventional narratives of the quick demise of the native populations because of forced labor and the spread of Old World diseases, this book shows the complexity of the initial exchange between the Old and New Worlds and examines the myriad ways the indigenous peoples responded to Spanish colonization.
 
Focusing on Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, the first Caribbean islands to be conquered and colonized by the Spanish, Anderson-Córdova explains Indian sociocultural transformation within the context of two specific processes, out-migration and in-migration, highlighting how population shifts contributed to the diversification of peoples. For example, as the growing presence of “foreign” Indians from other areas of the Caribbean complicated the variety of responses by Indian groups, her investigation reveals that Indians who were subjected to slavery, or the “encomienda system,” accommodated and absorbed many Spanish customs, yet resumed their own rituals when allowed to return to their villages. Other Indians fled in response to the arrival of the Spanish.
 
The culmination of years of research, Surviving Spanish Conquest deftly incorporates archaeological investigations at contact sites copious use of archival materials, and anthropological assessments of the contact period in the Caribbean. Ultimately, understanding the processes of Indian-Spanish interaction in the Caribbean enhances comprehension of colonization in many other parts of the world. Anderson-Córdova concludes with a discussion regarding the resurgence of interest in the Taíno people and their culture, especially of individuals who self-identify as Taíno. This volume provides a wealth of insight to historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and those interested in early cultures in contact.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780817390907
Publisher:	University of Alabama Press
Publication date:	04/18/2017
Series:	Caribbean Archaeology and Ethnohistory
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Karen F. Anderson-Córdova is retired from the historic preservation division of the Georgia Department of Natural Resources. Throughout the course of her career, she served as an instructor of anthropology at Georgia State University, an assistant professor of anthropology and social sciences at the University of Puerto Rico, a Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer, and a historian and archaeologist in the State Historic Preservation Office in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

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Surviving Spanish Conquest

Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico

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By Karen F. Anderson-Córdova

The University of Alabama Press

Copyright © 2017 University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-9090-7

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CHAPTER 1

The Inhabitants of the Caribbean at the Time of Columbus

When Columbus made landfall on October 12, 1492, in the New World, he encountered islands whose human inhabitants and natural environments were very different from what Europeans had seen before. This encounter, which marked the beginning of one of the most tragic episodes of human history, forever transformed the Old World and the New. In the words of Todorov, "The discovery of America, or of the Americans, is certainly the most astonishing encounter of our history" (1984:4).

Any study of what happened during those first years of Euro-Indian contact begins with understanding the nature of the native peoples encountered by Columbus. This statement appears simple enough, but as discussed here, there is a growing consensus that the native peoples of the Caribbean were a more varied lot than previously believed, and that the simple dichotomy of Taíno (referring to the native inhabitants of the Greater Antilles) and Carib (referring to the native inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles) is no longer tenable.

Early historic sources provide synchronic information on Indian society and culture at the time of contact and in the years immediately following, and archaeological and linguistic data provide a diachronic view of the origins and historical development of the peoples who unwittingly erupted onto the European scene and consciousness at the end of the fifteenth century. When Columbus and his men set foot in America, it was the reward of a purposeful voyage to discover new lands. Although the peoples of America were initially foreign to the Europeans, both they and their lands were swept into the sphere of European expansion. However, in the case of the Indians, their "discovery" by Europeans was an intrusion into their separate cultural development for which they had no antecedents, and they had to develop novel responses in an effort to survive. This is a pivotal difference between the two sides of conflict. Despite the hardships that individual Spaniards also had to endure in the process of conquering and settling the New World, they were there with a purpose and because, in a certain sense, they had chosen to come. The Indians had no choice in the matter and had to endure and find ways to respond to the destruction of their world.

The inhabitants encountered by Columbus in the Bahamas, Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico were originally known simply as Indians by the Spanish. Although we are all very much aware that this is a misnomer brought about by Columbus's mistaken belief that he had arrived at the eastern lands of the Great Khan of China, the term stuck and was applied generically to all the native inhabitants of the New World. It is still used today. During the early decades of Spanish colonization, the Spanish began distinguishing between the more developed Indian chiefdoms encountered in the Greater Antilles (with the exception of Western Cuba) and the Indians inhabiting the Lesser Antilles, which they called Caribs.

The term "Taíno," in reference to the Greater Antillean inhabitants, was never used by the Spanish. However, starting in the late nineteenth century and becoming prevalent in the twentieth, Taíno entered the lexicon as a term to describe the people of the Greater Antillean chiefdom societies at the time of contact (Lovén 1935; Sauer 1969:37; see also Curet 2014:417–472). It is ironic that the widespread use of the term "Taíno" by Caribbean scholars to name the inhabitants of the Greater Antilles is as much a misnomer as the Spaniards' use of the term "Indians" to refer to the inhabitants of the New World. The term, in my view, served to identify a group of peoples who shared a chiefdom level of social and political organization, as well as what appears to have been a shared tradition of material culture traits and religious/ritual beliefs.

However, as stressed by Wilson (1993), Curet (2014), Oliver (2009), and Rodríguez Ramos (2010), the term "Taíno" masks the diversity and variability of the late prehistoric peoples in these islands and the myriad of influences that shaped them, or what Wilson has called "the cultural mosaic of the indigenous Caribbean" (1993:37). In fact, Curet (2014:475–476) calls this the Taíno Paradox — the cultural variability demonstrated in the archaeological record and the obvious strong similarities in material culture and cultural practices. These strong similarities, especially in ritual and cosmology, are called "Taínoness" by Oliver (2009) and Rodríguez Ramos (2010). Curet (2014:480) borrows the concept of "symbolic reservoir," developed by scholars studying African cultures and defined as "the assemblage of symbols, beliefs, and myths from which groups or subgroups obtain the ideological tools necessary to 'create' a cultural tradition to legitimize their own interests" (McIntosh 1998:61,quoted in Curet 2014:480), as one with wider application than Taíno or Taínoness "in explaining the similarities in the assemblages from the Greater Antilles and Bahamas and even from the 'Taíno' sites reported outside the traditional Taíno culture area in the Leeward Islands" (2014:481). Curet further argues that since this concept is not constrained to a particular set of cultural characteristics, as implied by Taíno or Taínoness, it could be more widely applied in the Caribbean area. He does not believe it is appropriate to keep using the term "Taíno," except to refer to the "Arawak language spoken in the Greater Antilles" (2014:482; see also Rodríguez Ramos 2010:201).

Curet makes a compelling argument, but this still leaves us with the question of how to refer to the Indians of the Greater Antilles at the time of contact. Taking into consideration what we now know about the ethnic variability that existed in the precolonial Caribbean (and, by the way, still exists today; see Wilson 1993), I will use the first Spanish misnomer of Indian to refer to the native inhabitants and, when appropriate, will apply the term "Caribbean chiefdoms" to refer to the broad sociopolitical characteristics of Indian societies of the Greater Antilles at the time of contact.

The origins and historical development of the prehistoric peoples of the Antilles have been summarized by many scholars, most comprehensively by Irving Rouse (1948:IV:495–565; 1952:VIII, parts 3, 4; 1986; 1987), whose influence on the methods, theory, and practice of Caribbean archaeology in the twentieth century is undisputed. His reconstruction of Caribbean culture history based on ceramic styles, subseries, and series, especially his reliance on migration and diffusion as the main explanatory processes, however, has been challenged by a new generation of scholars (Rodríguez Ramos 2010; Curet 2005; Chanlatte and Narganes 1986; Keegan 2000, 2013). My summary, although necessarily general for the purposes of this volume, incorporates some of these new perspectives.

The Indians encountered by Columbus in the Greater Antilles were descendants of migratory waves of ceramic agriculturalists who entered the Lesser Antilles and traveled up the island chain, the earliest ones arriving in Puerto Rico, the easternmost island of the Greater Antilles, around 300 to 400 BC. Most scholars agree that the chiefdoms encountered by Columbus in Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Cuba were a product of centuries of local development. However, local development does not imply isolation, as there were also influences from the South American mainland (Veloz Maggiolo et al. 1981:309–310), as well as interactions of Caribbean peoples with Central Americans (Rodríguez Ramos 2013; Wilson 2007; Dacal Moure and Rivero de la Calle 1996; Hofman et al. 2011; Callaghan 2011). The origins of material characteristics described for the late prehistoric chiefdoms, such as the sculpting of zemis and the construction of public works such as ball courts and plazas, are traced at least as far back as A.D. 700 to the Ostionoid series in Puerto Rico (Moscoso 1986:281–282; Alegría 1983a:117). However, the chiefdom societies encountered by the Spanish developed during the period of A.D. 1000–1500 in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico (Moscoso 1986:296) and correlate with the Classic Taíno, in Rouse's terminology (Rouse 1986:149; 1987:300, 305). Different ceramic styles and series of styles have been identified for this period in the Antilles (see Rouse 1988) and indicate local variations within a wider cultural ceramic tradition.

Subsistence and Technology

The Indians of the Greater Antilles at the time of contact were agricultural peoples, inheritors of the South American tradition of manioc cultivation. They cultivated the bitter variety of manioc, which constituted their staple food, cassava bread. Archaeological and ethnographic accounts support the conclusion that these were sedentary peoples who practiced intensive cultivation methods. In addition to manioc, the Indians grew a variety of other crops that, although secondary in importance, were also widely used. Among these were arrowroot, sweet potatoes, pineapple, ají (pepper), avocado, maize, various fruit trees, root crops such as yautía and leren, calabashes or gourds, and cotton (see Lovén 1935:350–409; Sturtevant 1961, for a detailed discussion of these; Petersen 1997). Despite the variety of crops planted, except for manioc, historic sources do not specify cultivation techniques. It is assumed that many of the other cultigens were intercropped in the manioc fields, as is the case with many contemporary South American tribes and in current subsistence farming in Hispaniola (Sauer 1969:52), although the sources are silent on this matter.

Historical descriptions of manioc cultivation are derived mainly from Las Casas (1951, 1985), Fernández de Oviedo (1959), and Mártir de Anglería (1944). Manioc was intensively planted in large fields called conucos. These were artificial earth mounds in which various tubers were planted. The basic process consisted of clearing the forest either by felling or girdling trees (Sauer 1969:51), burning the resultant brush, and piling up the mounds by means of the coa, or digging stick. The work of clearing the fields and constructing the mounds was labor intensive and was carried out by the men; women contributed in the planting of the tubers and in the harvest one to three years later. Although the extent of the manioc fields and the fallow period, if there was any, is unknown, historical sources attest to widespread areas under cultivation in both the coast and the interior of the islands (Varela 1982; Las Casas 1951, 1985; Mártir de Anglería 1944).

Information concerning crop yields is difficult to assess, although Moscoso, using Las Casas' figures, notes the correlation between sources indicating a dense sedentary population for the Greater Antillean islands and the probable yields of cassava during the early historic period (1986:423–426). Comparative evidence of high yields provided by manioc cultivation under the slash-and-burn method characteristic of South American tropical forest cultures has been documented by Carneiro (1961). Although manioc alone is not sufficient for a balanced diet despite its high-yield potential, its presence in combination with other Caribbean cultigens, and supplemented with fresh water and marine faunal resources, provided adequate nutrition. Manioc continued to be cultivated in the early historic period, and was heavily relied upon by the Spanish as a source of food for themselves and for feeding the Indian labor force.

Agricultural yields must have varied locally in the islands and may have been quite productive in the northern valleys of Hispaniola, along the Río Verde and Río Yaque del Norte, where cultivation of the fertile floodplains, termed cultivo de várzea is reported (Veloz Maggiolo et al. 1981:328–329). The possible use of irrigation in Xaraguá, in southwestern Hispaniola, is suggested by historical references (Mártir de Anglería 1944, cited in Sauer 1969:53, note 14), but, to my knowledge, it has not been corroborated archaeologically. More recently, agricultural terraces correlated with the late prehistoric period in the mountainous interior of Puerto Rico suggest intensification of agricultural practices (deFrance and Newsom 2005:183; Oliver et al. 1999).

Besides agriculture, the native inhabitants of the Greater Antilles relied upon a variety of faunal resources, including both marine and land animals, to complement their diet. Although the technological implements for agricultural endeavors consisted mainly of the digging stick and stone celt for felling and clearing vegetation, a great variety of techniques and implements for the harvesting of marine resources is documented in the historical literature. The relative importance of these techniques and their possible yield is unknown.

Apparently, in basic technology, the Caribbean chiefdoms did not differ much from their early agricultural predecessors. The large populations and increased productivity of agriculture suggested generally by the historical accounts were accomplished by the reorganization of the productive forces of society, and not by any technological breakthrough.

Sociopolitical Organization

The consensus among historians and archaeologists of the Caribbean is that the Greater Antillean Indian societies were organized into a series of polities known as chiefdoms of various degrees of complexity. The Spanish sources describe a society divided into chiefdoms or cacicazgos of varying importance with hierarchically ranked categories of caciques (chiefs), nitaínos (nobles), and naborías (commoners and slaves). They describe the cacicazgos as comprising multiple yucayeques (villages) under the leadership of a paramount chief, or cacique, with social, economic, and ritual authority (Torres 2013:348). These Spanish terms are still in use today, and the Spanish chroniclers' descriptions of Indian society as they viewed it still form the main body of evidence for analyzing the nature and distribution of Caribbean chiefdoms at the time of contact.

Caribbean chiefdoms have been studied within the wider context of neo-evolutionary theories seeking to describe and explain the evolution of social complexity and consolidation of political power (Earle 1989, in Torres 2013:348; see also Service 1968, Earle 1997). Divergent opinions within this neo-evolutionary perspective include Alcina's (1983:69) contention that the Taíno polities were more than just tribal groups but still not full-fledged chiefdoms and Moscoso's (1986) argument that they were well on their way to becoming a class-structured society when their development was thwarted by the Spanish invasion. Both authors' positions are based mainly on their interpretation of the historical record as gleaned from ethnohistoric sources.

Within an evolutionary continuum, Alcina (1983) interprets the Taíno chiefdoms as transitional between tribal societies and fully developed chiefdoms. Following Harris (1982), Alcina considers the redistributive character of chiefdoms as critical in their development, because it allows the expansion of administrative functions, differing access to resources, and the hierarchy of social groups (Harris 1982:110 quoted in Alcina 1983:69). However, Alcina argues that the Taíno chiefdoms do not exhibit these characteristics (1983:75). He also argues that although the Taíno chiefdoms were apparently capable of supporting dense populations, they had a more dispersed type of settlement pattern than the "urban" or "semiurban" populations characteristic of fully developed chiefdoms (1983:73). According to Alcina, the Taíno lacked slaves, a differentiated priest or temple cult, and a militaristic class, all prerequisites of more complex, stratified chiefdoms. The lack of evidence in the historical sources for artisan specialization and tribute also suggest to him that the Taínos had not yet developed into true chiefdoms at the time of contact with the Spanish.

In contrast to Alcina, and relying on a cultural materialistic, Marxist interpretation, Moscoso (1986) argues that the Taíno chiefdoms were well on the way to becoming a class-structured society at the time of Spanish contact. He argues that the reliance on the hierarchical divisions of Taíno society by the Spanish authorities in their organization of forced Indian labor under the encomienda system, and the persistence of the distinctions between caciques, nitaínos, and naborías (commoners) well into the historic period, mimics the pre-Columbian situation as much as it does the Spaniards' hierarchical viewpoint.

According to Moscoso (1983:309–489), the Taíno chiefdoms' mode of production was tribal-tributary. The Taínos lived in relatively dense, sedentary villages capable of producing an agricultural surplus, which was appropriated by a chiefly class. The chiefly class included the caciques, nitaínos (who assisted the chiefs in the organization of agricultural and artisanal productions), and behiques (medicine men or shamans with ritual and religious authority). The rest were naborías. The sociopolitical organization was of hierarchical, pyramidal chiefdoms that governed specific territories of varying importance. Moscoso argues that the ethnohistorical accounts of the kingdoms of cacique Behecchio and the list of tribute goods collected by Columbus (1986:446–447) attest to the productive capabilities of the Taíno chiefdoms and the existence of a class of artisans; only this could account for the richness and technical mastery required to fabricate some of the items. He follows Fernández de Oviedo and Las Casas in accepting the existence of five territories or provinces within aboriginal Hispaniola and of a paramount chief in Puerto Rico (cacique Agüeybaná) (figure 1.1).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction: Cultures in Contact 1. The Inhabitants of the Caribbean at the Time of Columbus 2. The Spanish Conquest and Colonization of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico 3. Cultural Transformations: Indian Response to Contact 4. Aboriginal Demography in the Antilles 5. The Voluntary and Forced Movement of Indians among the Islands and the Mainland 6. Spain’s First New World Frontier and “Taínoness” Today Appendix 1: Historical Evidence for Interisland Movement of Indians, from Columbus’s Diary of the First Voyage Appendix 2: Chronology of the Indian Slave Trade: Legislation and Other Pertinent Documentary Evidence Notes Bibliographic Essay References Cited Index

Editorial Reviews

“Surviving Spanish Conquest is an important and worthwhile addition to the literature of Caribbean contact studies. Anderson-Córdova's contextualization of ethnogenisis and the fresh twist she gives it will revitalize debate among scholars over indigenous agency during the critical early years of Spanish imperial reach in the Caribbean.”
—Ethnoarchaeology
 
“Anthropologist Anderson-Córdova's analysis of Indian-Spanish relations in the 16th-century Caribbean reveals a sophisticated, new appreciation for the historical data. The book is based on an impressive knowledge of original sources, archaeological evidence, and ethnohistorical theories, and supplemented with appendixes and a bibliographic essay. Required for all Caribbeanist libraries and students alike. Essential.”
—CHOICE
 
“An original and significant contribution to multiple fields in Caribbean studies. Surviving Spanish Conquest will be used widely by historians, archaeologists, and students of Caribbean society and culture, as well as by scholars of American Indian history.”
—Kathleen Deagan, coauthor of Columbus’s Outpost among the Taínos: Spain and America at La Isabela, 1493-1498
 


“Surviving Spanish Conquest provides a solid overview of early colonial encounters in sixteenth-century Hispaniola and Puerto Rico from both ethnohistorical and archaeological points of view. It is an excellent book in every sense.”
—Gabriel De La Luz-Rodríguez, professor, Department of Social Sciences, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

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