Arawak

The name of a specific Native group (Lokono) that inhabited the Guianas and portions of Trinidad and of a family of languages originally spoken in portions of northeastern South America, the Greater and Lesser Antilles, and parts of Central America.

Linguistically related to Caribbean groups, ArawAkan speakers lived in the Amazonian forests of South America and followed a hunting and gathering subsistence along the banks of the upper Amazon, the Rio Negro, and the headwaters of the Orinoco Rivers. They supplemented their food resources by sometimes raising turtles in pens and practicing slash-and-burn horticulture, but the limited fertility of these jungle areas forced groups located away from the major river systems to practice a seminomadic lifestyle. These South American Arawak often fought Carib speakers who lived along the lower Amazon and the upper Orinoco Rivers and the Guiana highlands for control of the region.

The Taino and Carib of the West Indies spoke ArawAkan languages, and as a result scholars have often labeled them as “Arawak.” Unfortunately, this implied close ethnic and cultural affinity with the South American groups, which was not the case. Island Carib culture and ethnicity probably resulted from the merger of Island Arawak speakers related to the Taino and Carib speakers in the Lesser Antilles. Although linguistically related to South American Arawak, the Taino represented an earlier migration to the Greater Antilles from South America and a separate cultural development that extended back centuries before contact with European Americans.

Further reading: Mary W. Helms, “The Indians of the Caribbean and Circum-Caribbean at the End of the Fifteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2, ed. Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 501-545; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (New York: Methuen, 1986); Irving Rouse, The Tainos: Rise and Fall of the People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992);-Migra

Tions in Prehistory: Inferring Population Movement from Cultural Remains (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986).

—Dixie Ray Haggard

Armada See Spanish Armada.