CULTURE BEFORE COLUMBUS
In October 1492, Christopher Columbus encountered the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean for the first time – and set in motion a chain of events that redrew the cultural and social landscape of the western hemisphere.
But who were the Taíno people Columbus met, who lived in the Bahamas and Antilles before European colonisation? And what can the art of the region tell us about how ideas were shared and dispersed on the islands and across neighbouring lands in Central and South America?
We spoke to James Doyle, Assistant Curator for the Art of the Ancient Americas at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, about the exhibition Arte del Mar: Artistic Exchange in the Caribbean, and particularly about what the beautiful artefacts and artworks on display can teach us about interactions between cultures across the Caribbean.
What do we know about the pre-Columbian inhabitants of the Caribbean islands?
The early human history of the Antilles is probably linked to multiple waves of migration that went back and forth from and to the mainland of northern South America – specifically, from the Orinoco Delta (in what’s now Venezuela), through Trinidad & Tobago, then up through the Lesser Antilles – beginning several thousand
