Taino village
Recreation of a Taino village, Baconao Park, near Santiago de Cuba, Cuba.
Taino
people
Also known as: Antillean Arawak
- Related Topics:
- Central American and northern Andean Indian
- Arawak
Taino, Arawakan-speaking people who at the time of Christopher Columbus’s exploration inhabited what are now Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Once the most numerous indigenous people of the Caribbean, the Taino may have numbered one or two million at the time of the Spanish conquest in the late 15th century. They had long been on the defensive against the aggressive Carib people, who had conquered the Lesser Antilles to the east. When they were first encountered by Europeans, the Taino practiced a high-yielding form of shifting agriculture to grow their staple ...(100 of 429 words)