Nevis

One of the Leeward Islands among the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea, Nevis contained an indigenous population for several centuries until they abandoned the island just before English colonization in 1628.

An oval volcanic island located at the northwest end of the Lesser Antilles near St. Kitts, Nevis was originally covered with forests, and it contains three volcanic cones, with the tallest, Nevis Peak, rising to a height of 985 meters. Indigenous people first populated the island around approximately 1000 B. c. This first group did not practice horticulture and depended upon hunting and gathering terrestrial and aquatic resources. Finally, around 200 B. c., a sedentary horticultural people moved to the island. These people eventually developed into the Eastern Taino, who occupied the island at the time of contact with Europeans. From this point until just before English colonization, these Taino suffered slave raids by Europeans to the north and west in the Greater Antilles and Island Carib to the south in the Leeward Islands of the Lesser Antilles. For unknown reasons the island was uninhabited by the time the English initiated colonization in the Leeward Islands in 1624.

In 1628 the English founded a colony on Nevis. The English became attracted to colonial development in the region due to the success of the Spanish and Dutch in the Caribbean. At first the English did not develop Nevis as a plantation colony, but they finally adopted a sugar plantation economy after Portuguese Jews introduced sugar cultivation to the Windward Islands between 1640 and 1650. Because of the limited acreage of flat land, these plantations tended to remain small, family-run enterprises.

Further reading: Helmut Blume, The Caribbean Islands, trans. Johannes Maczewski and Ann Norton (London: Longman, 1974); Irving Rouse, “The Tainos,” in Migrations in Prehistory: Inferring Population Movement from Cultural Remains (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,

1986), 105-156;--, The Tainos: Rise and Decline of

The People Who Greeted Columbus (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992); Samuel M. Wilson, “The Prehistoric Settlement Pattern of Nevis, West Indies,” Journal of Field Archaeology 16 (1989): 427-450.

—Dixie Ray Haggard