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The Lucayan people ( ) were the original residents of The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands before the European colonisation of the Americas. They were a branch of the Taínos who inhabited most of the Caribbean and the Bahamas. The Lucayans were the first Indigenous Americans encountered by Christopher Columbus (in October 1492). Shortly after contact, the Spanish kidnapped and enslaved Lucayans with the displacement culminating in the complete eradication of the Lucayan people from the Bahamas by 1520.
The name "Lucayan" is an Anglicization of the Spanish Lucayos, itself a hispanicization derived from the Lucayan Lukku-Cairi, which the people used for themselves, meaning "people of the islands". The Taíno word for "island", cairi, became cayo in Spanish and "cay" in English spelled.
Some Human cranium and artifacts of "Ciboney type" were reportedly found on Andros Island, but if some Ciboney did reach the Bahamas ahead of the Lucayans, they left no known evidence of occupation. Some possible Ciboney archaeological sites have been found elsewhere in the Bahamas, but the only one subjected to radiocarbon dating dated to the mid- to late-12th century, contemporaneous with Lucayan presence on the islands.
Christopher Columbus's diario contains the only contemporaneous observations of the Lucayans. Other information about the customs of the Lucayans has come from archaeological investigations and comparison with what is known of Taíno culture in Cuba and Hispaniola. The Lucayans were distinguished from the Taínos of Cuba and Hispaniola in the size of their houses, the organization and location of their villages, the resources they used, and the materials used in their pottery.
William Keegan argues that the sites on Caicos therefore represent a colonization after 1200 by Taínos from Hispaniola seeking salt from the natural salt pans on the island. Great Inagua is closer to both Hispaniola, at , and Cuba, at , than any other island in the Bahamas, and sites on Great Inagua contain large quantities of sand-tempered pottery imported from Cuba and/or Hispaniola, while sites on other islands in the Bahamas contain more shell-tempered pottery ("Palmetto Ware"), which developed in the Bahamas.
While trade in dugout canoes between Cuba and Long Island was reported by Columbus, this involved a voyage of at least over open water, although much of that was on the very shallow waters of the Great Bahama Bank. The Taínos probably did not settle in central Cuba until after 1000, and there is no particular evidence that this was the route of the initial settlement of the Bahamas.
From an initial settlement of Great Inagua Island, the Lucayans expanded throughout the Bahamas Islands in some 800 years (c. 700 – c. 1500), growing to a population of about 40,000. Population density at the time of first European contact was highest in the south central area of the Bahamas, declining towards the north, reflecting the progressively shorter time of occupation of the northern islands. Known Lucayan settlement sites are confined to the nineteen largest islands in the archipelago, or to smaller cays located less than one kilometre from those islands.
Keegan posits a north-ward migration route from Great Inagua Island to Acklins and Crooked Islands, then on to Long Island. From Long Island expansion would have gone east to Rum Cay and San Salvador Island, north to Cat Island and west to Great and Little Exuma Islands. From Cat Island the expansion proceeded to Eleuthera, from which New Providence and Andros to the west and Great and Little Abaco Islands and Grand Bahama to the north were reached. Lucayan village sites are also known on Mayaguana, east of Acklins Island, and Samana Cay, north of Acklins.
There are village sites on East Caicos, East Caicos and North Caicos and on Providenciales, in the Caicos Islands, at least some of which Keegan attributes to a later settlement wave from Hispaniola. Population density in the southernmost Bahamas remained lower, probably due to the drier climate there, less than of rain a year on Great Inagua Island and the Turks and Caicos Islands and only slightly higher on Acklins and Crooked Islands and Mayaguana.
Based on Lucayan names for the islands, Granberry and Vescelius argue for two origins of settlement; one from Hispaniola to the Turks and Caicos Islands through Mayaguana and Acklins and Crooked Islands to Long Island and the Great and Little Exuma Islands, and another from Cuba through Great Inagua Island, Little Inagua Island and Ragged Island to Long Island and the Exumas. Granberry and Vescelius also state that around 1200 the Turks and Caicos Islands were resettled from Hispaniola and were thereafter part of the Classical Taíno culture and language area, and no longer Lucayan.
Some people wore head bands, waist bands, feathers, bones and ear and nose jewelry on occasion. They were often tattooed and usually applied paint to their bodies and/or faces. They also practiced head flattening. Their hair was black and straight, and they kept it cut short except for a few hairs in back which were never cut. Columbus reported seeing scars on the bodies of some of the men, which were explained to him as resulting from attempts by people from other islands to capture them.
Columbus spent a few days visiting other islands in the vicinity: Santa María de la Concepción, Fernandina, and Saomete. Lucayans on San Salvador had told Columbus that he could find a "king" who had a lot of gold at the village of Samaot, also spelled Samoet, Saomete or Saometo. Taíno chiefs and villages often shared a name. Keegan suggests that the confusion of spellings was due to grammatically differing forms of the name for the chief and for the village or island, or was simply due to Columbus's difficulty with the Lucayan language.
Columbus spent three days sailing back and forth along the shore of an island seeking Samaot. At one point he sought to reach Samaot by sailing eastward, but the water was too shallow, and he felt that sailing around the island was "a very long way". Keegan interprets this description to fit the Acklins/Crooked Islands group, with a ship in the west side being able to see the western shore of Acklins Island across the very shallow waters of the Bight of Acklins, where there was a village that stretched about along the shore.
Amerigo Vespucci spent almost four months in the Bahamas in 1499 to 1500. His log of that time is vague, perhaps because he was trespassing on Columbus's discoveries, which at the time remained under Columbus. There may have been other unrecorded Spanish landfalls in the Bahamas, shipwrecks and slaving expeditions. Maps published between 1500 and 1508 appear to show details of the Bahamas, Cuba and the North American mainland that were not officially reported until later. European artifacts of the period have been found on San Salvador, the Caicos Islands, Long Island, Little Exuma, Acklins Island, Conception Island and Samaná Cay. Such finds, however, do not prove that Spaniards visited those islands, as trade among Lucayans could have distributed the artifacts.
At first the Lucayans sold for no more than four Doubloon in Hispaniola, but when it was realized that the Lucayans were practiced at diving for , the price rose to 100 to 150 gold pesos and the Lucayans were sent to the Isle of Cubagua as Pearl diving. Within two years the southern Bahamas were largely depopulated. The Spanish may have carried away as many as 40,000 Lucayans by 1513.
Carl O. Sauer described Ponce de León's 1513 expedition in which he encountered Florida as simply "an extension of slave hunting beyond the empty islands." When the Spanish decided to traffic the remaining Lucayans to Hispaniola in 1520, they could find only eleven in all of the Bahamas. Thereafter the Bahamas remained uninhabited for 130 years.
There are no surviving reports of the size of Lucayan houses, but estimates of about 20 people per house in Taíno communities in pre-contact Cuba are cited by Keegan as a reasonable estimate for Lucayan houses. While not mentioned for Lucayan houses, the houses in Cuba were described as having two doors. Classic Taíno villages in Hispaniola and eastern Cuba typically had houses arranged around a central plaza, and often located along rivers with access to good agricultural land. Lucayan villages were linear, along the coast, often on the leeward side of an island, but also found on the windward side wherever provided some protected shoreline.
The staple crop of the Lucayans was manioc (cassava), followed by sweet potato. Sweet manioc was eaten like sweet potato, by peeling and boiling. Bitter manioc, which has a dangerous amount of hydrogen cyanide, was prepared by peeling, grinding, and mashing. The mash was then filtered through a basket tube to remove the hydrogen cyanide as a poisonous juice. The filtered mash was dried and sieved for flour, which was used to make pancake-like bread cooked on a flat clay griddle. The poisonous hydrogen cyanide juice was boiled, which released the poison, and the liquid base mixed with Chili pepper, vegetables, meat, and fish to make a slow-boiling stew that prevented the spoiling of its ingredients.
The Spanish also reported that the Lucayans grew sweet potatoes, Xanthosoma, arrowroot, leren, yampee, peanuts, beans and cucurbits. The Lucayans probably took most, if not all, of their crops with them to the Bahamas. The Lucayans may have grown papayas, pineapples, guava, Mammea americana, guinep and tamarind fruit.
There were few land animals available in the Bahamas for hunting: Bahamian hutia (Taíno utia), Cyclura, small lizards, land crabs and birds. While Taínos kept dogs and , only dogs were reported by early observers, or found at Lucayan sites. Less than 12% of the meat eaten by Lucayans came from land animals, of which three-quarters came from iguanas and land crabs.
More than 80 percent of the meat in the Lucayan diet came from marine fishes, almost all of which grazed on seagrass and/or coral. Sea turtles and marine mammals (West Indian monk seal and porpoise) provided a very small portion of the meat in the Lucayan diet. The balance of dietary meat came from marine mollusks. The main meats were fishes and mollusks from the grass flat and patch reef habitats that are found between the beach and the barrier reef, and include parrotfish, grouper, snapper, bonefish, queen conch, urchins, nerites, chitons, and clams.
Maize was a recent introduction to the Greater Antilles when the Spanish arrived, and was only a minor component of the Taíno and, presumably, Lucayan diets.
Trumpet-like instruments that were played by blowing were also made of conch. A specific term, guamo, existed for trumpets made from the largest snail available, the Atlantic Triton. These were used, similarly to church bells, to call people into action as well as for religious rites.
One of the few artifacts of Lucayan life that has been found in a variety of areas in the Bahama archipelago is the duho. Duhos are carved seats found in the houses of Taíno caciques or chiefs throughout the Caribbean region. Duhos "figured prominently in the maintenance of Taíno political and ideological systems . . . and . . . literally seats of power, prestige, and ritual."Conrad, Geoffrey W., John W. Foster, and Charles D. Beeker, "Organic artifacts from the Manantial de la Aleta, Dominican Republic: preliminary observations and interpretations", Journal of Caribbean Archaeology. 2:6, 2001. Duhos made of wood and stone have both been found, though those made of wood tend not to last as well as the stone chairs and are, therefore, much rarer. There are intact wooden duhos in the collections of the Musée de l'Homme in Paris and British Museum in London (the latter found on the island of Eleuthera). British Museum Collection
They include fruitfulness spirits Yocahu, the male giver of manioc, and Attabeira, the mother goddess. Attending to them were the twin spirits Maquetaurie Guayaba, the lord of the dead, and Guabancex, the mistress of the hurricane. The twin spirits were also attended to by sets of twins.
During arieto ceremonies, food was offered to the zemi, and shamans (behique) would give a piece of cassava bread to participants, which were kept preserved until the following year.
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