Ms.

Nicholson
Caribbean History
 Indigenous-originating and living or occurring naturally in an area or
environment.
 Migration- is the movement by people from one place to another with
the intention of settling in the new location.
 Nomad- a member of a people that travels from place to place to find
fresh pasture for its animals and has no permanent home.
 Amerindian-coined in the beginning of the twentieth century, is a
generic term for all of the aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas.
 During the Ice Age, humans relied on hunting
and gathering their food to survive.
 They were nomadic because the animals
they hunted moved around in search of food.
 The people of Beringia probably followed and
hunted caribou, mammoth and deer across
the plains.
 Humans also depended on animals for their
clothing and shelter, camping in animal skin
tents as they travelled across Beringia.
 The main groups of the Amerindians who were found
were (a) the Mayans and (b) the Kalinagos and the
Tainos.
 The word ‘Arawak’ was the language spoken by an
Amerindian group, which included the Lucayans,
Borequinos, and the main group who gave themselves
the name ‘Tainos’, which came from the ‘Taíno’,
meaning ‘peace’ or ‘men of the ‘good’.
 The language of the Kalinagos, on the other hand,
was called ‘Cariban’. ‘Carib’, the name given by the
Europeans to the Kalinagos, is the word from which
the word ‘Caribbean’ comes.
 The Tainos and the Kalinagos lived in South
America.
 The Tainos probably occupied almost all of
the northern part of South America.
 The Kalinagos, on the other hand, probably
lived on lands between the Amazon and the
Guiana’s.
 The Tainos migrated in a north-easterly direction to
Venezuela and then into the Lesser Antilles, moving
up the chain of islands until they entered the Greater
Antilles.
 The Kalinagos arrived at the Gulf of Paria from where
they took to the sea. They moved up the chain of the
Leeward Islands, pushing out the Arawaks.
 They Tainos in Trinidad resisted the Kalinagos, and so
continued to occupy all but the north-western part of
that island which the Kalinagos occupied. By the time
the Spanish had arrived, the Kalinagos had reached
eastern Puerto Rico.
 The Amerindians who had settled on the
North American continent, in Florida, could
have moved from Florida into the southern
islands of the Caribbean, including Trinidad.
 Those in Central America could have also
moved directly to the Caribbean.
Took advantage
of the
Caribbean
Counter Current
and were able
to reach Cuba
and move
eastward into
Hispaniola

To the
islands

To the
islands

Taino cradeland
Kalinago
Cradeland
 The Tainos arrived first, between the first and seventh
centuries A.D., reached Jamaica about 1,000 A.D. The
Kalinagos arrived the Tainos, and were still arriving
when Columbus came to the region. The following are
possible reasons for their migration:
 Migration was an integral part of their culture; a
practice cultivated and passed on by their ancestors.
 The population had outgrown the available food
resources in their homeland, and it was becoming
more difficult to feed everyone, so there was the need
to find new lands.
 The Amerindians were a seafaring people and
they could have accidentally discovered any one
of the islands on one of the expeditions, and
opted to migrate there on the premise that it
was ideal for the creation of settlements.
 The Tainos might have seen the islands as a
place for refuge from the Kalinagos and the
Kalinagos might have migrated in search of new
preys/prey, or in pursuit of the Tainos.
 Migration was integral part of their culture; a
practice cultivated and passed on by their
ancestors.
 Canoeing,
 Seafaring,
 Familiarity with the Caribbean maritime
environment,
 Coastal trading activities and
 Warfare