How Archaeologists Are Unearthing the Secrets of the Bahamas’ First Inhabitants #archaeology #history #bahamas

An illustration of Lucayan divers spearfishing for parrotfish, turtles and conch Project SIBA / © Merald Clark

Smithsonian Magazine has a piece about the first inhabitants of the Bahamas.  Until recently, not much was known of the Lukku-Cairi, who settled in the Bahamas around 700 C.E.  The name Lukki-Caira means "people of the islands".  They are now referred to as the Lucayans and were part of a greater Caribbean civilization called the Tainos.  A new book "Lucayan Legacies: Indigenous Lifeways in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands" by Joanna Ostapkowicz, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, looks to describe and document the Lucayans.

In 2007, Pateman participated in an excavation at Preacher’s Cave on the Bahamian island of Eleuthera, where a group of Puritan English settlers expelled from Bermuda due to their religious beliefs found themselves shipwrecked in 1648. The dig team discovered the ends of tobacco pipes smoked by the Eleutheran Adventurers. But the would-be migrants’ garbage masked a far older prehistory: the remains of several Lucayans, including a 25- to 30-year-old man who was laid to rest with an Atlantic triton shell (probably used as a drinking cup) on his chest. Behind his left shoulder was a charm made up of 29 iridescent sunrise tellin shells, a lump of red ocher and a fish bone tool used to scratch designs into human skin. The bones of a sea turtle lay at his feet.

“These unusual grave goods were all instruments of power and faith,” Pateman says. “Our best thinking is that this was a shaman or cacique, a local ruler, buried with his wife and matriarch of the community, maybe as early as 1050.”

Spanish clergyman Bartolomé de las Casas believed the Lucayans were simple people who had a “confused knowledge” of God. But data from around 120 burials spanning the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos suggests the group engaged in religious rituals, some of which centered on water. In a world where dying young was the norm, says Pateman, “the Lucayans felt very vulnerable, so guidance from the ancestors and spirits was an essential reassurance.”