The People Who Greeted Columbus Lost Kingdoms of Central America

In October 1492, on a Caribbean beach,

the indigenous people spotted distant white specks on the horizon.

They were Spanish ships, travellers from another world.

Christopher Columbus will forever be lauded for that famous first voyage.

But for centuries, those who welcomed him

to the Americas have been ignored.

The people on the beach were called the Taino.

And when Columbus met the Taino, the Old World met the New.

History typically caricatures that moment as when those from

the periphery met those from the centre,

when primitives met progress.

But when we understand more about that first fateful encounter,

who will go down in history as primitive?

The violent, gold-hungry Spanish?

Or the little-known,

but highly-developed culture they colonised?

My name is Jago Cooper.

I'm a specialist in the archaeology of the Americas.

In this series I will be exploring the rise and fall

of forgotten civilisations,

from the crystal clear seas of the Caribbean,

to the New World's most impressive pyramids...

..over the smoking volcanoes of Costa Rica

and deep underground in the caves of central Mexico.

I'll travel in the footsteps of these peoples

to reveal their secrets, to unearth the astonishing cultures that

flourished amongst some of the most dramatic landscapes in the world.

The story of the peoples of the Caribbean,

whose sophistication allowed them to share

a common culture across hundreds of islands,

who developed belief systems that were both spiritual

and functional,

and who welcomed Columbus to the Americas with fateful consequences.

This is one of the most fascinating stories of all.

It's the story of the Taino.

Columbus destroyed as he discovered and it's only now,

by exploring the archipelago's archaeology,

that we can solve the riddle.

How did a dynamic culture survive, thrive

and bloom in this string of glistening islands?

The islands of the Caribbean archipelago have long been

a magnet for people.

But the human story begins long before tourists

and cruise ships, deep in the ancient past.

This chain of islands has had many names over the centuries.

It's been the West Indies, the Antilles Archipelago

and of course, simply, the Caribbean.

I'm starting on the island of Hispaniola.

The western half is Haiti and where I am in the east,

is now the Dominican Republic.

For over 15 years, I've been working here excavating the rich,

red soils of the Caribbean.

It's a stunning place, a mix of European, African, Latino

and indigenous influences.

But what I've discovered is that it's always been

a place of huge ethnic diversity.

The modern, multicultural Caribbean is unwittingly following in

the footsteps of the much earlier, much neglected Taino culture.

When the Spanish Conquistadors claimed these islands

500 years ago,

they left some accounts of the people they encountered.

But the testimony of invaders tends to justify their actions,

and can only be trusted so far.

To learn the truth, we must supplement their stories with

the evidence archaeology can painstakingly uncover.

The first traces of the Taino can be found here in the remote

southeast corner of the Dominican Republic, buried deep in the jungle.

Joining our expedition is Fatima Portorreal, a local

anthropologist, who has studied the art of the indigenous population.

This dense rainforest is difficult to penetrate.

Uno, dos, tres.

But the thorns and fallen trees that impede progress have helped preserve

this secret site for centuries.

Critical to the understanding of any culture is

an understanding of how they saw their place in the world.

And at the heart of a worldview is a belief about your origins.

Gracias.

To begin to understand the Taino, you need to understand

where they believed they came from.

And significantly, they believed that they came from

the heart of these islands.

In order to find out more, we've come to

these remote and quite inaccessible caves, two hours on horseback

into the heart of the national park of the Parque del Este.

This is known as the cave of Jose Maria.

Amid the stalactites, stalagmites, guano

and exotic insects are clues to the Taino belief system.

Deep in this huge, natural limestone chamber, are wall paintings,

or pictographs, which remained hidden for hundreds of years.

They show how the Taino told their own story.

Some of the pictographs are recognisably similar to

others found in caves across the Caribbean.

But others are unlike anything I've ever seen before.

Stunning.

Beautiful.

Enigmatic.

There are more than 1,200 pictographs in this cave alone,

and it's incredible to think of the Taino clambering down here

barefoot, with naked flames and the most basic of painting materials.

Scientific analysis tells us that the first people

arrived on these islands around 5,000 BC.

And these first people must have arrived from overseas.

But the Taino origin myth, written on the walls around me, emphasises

that the Taino were rooted on these islands and belonged here.

What's important and why this cave creation myth is

so significant is that people have been living

continuously in these islands for millennia.

This isn't a developed culture that migrated into the Caribbean,

this is culture that was born here on these islands.

So Taino beliefs helped to create a sense of belonging and community.

But what about their more tangible traits?

What did they wear, what did they look like?

To find out, I'm travelling to a small private museum to meet

with Hayley Mickleburgh, who's been studying Taino skeletal remains.

I asked Hayley just what I'd see

if I came face to face with an ancient Taino islander.

They were generally a lot smaller than we are

so let's say 1.5m, 1.60, a little bit bigger.

And we also know that they were relatively robust.

They were quiet muscular. We also know from muscle attachments

on the bones that people were very physically active,

so we know that they had a strenuous, active lifestyle.

They would have worn less clothes than we're used to but they would

have been fully dressed in the sense that they wore body ornamentation.

For example, what we have here is a body stamp.

This one's interesting because it has two different sides,

so there's two different images on that.

I really like it, it's nice.

And what they would have done is they would have applied the paint to

the body stamp and then applied it to their body in various locations.

But one of the most visually striking things about the Taino

is not their nakedness, their body paint or their short stature.

It's the startling shape of their skulls.

What we have here is four skulls of people excavated in Hispaniola.

One of the things we can see here, for example, in this individual,

is what's called cranial modification, and this is

something people did to purposefully change the shape of their head.

What happened was when the child was very young they would use

different pressure points on the skull using wooden planks

or bandages or whatever, and they would wrap them around the skull

for about a year to 18 months

until the skull had grown naturally into this shape

and you can see it very nicely in this person that we have here.

One of the traditional views was that modified skulls

belonged to the elite class but we now know from more recent

research that up to 80% of skeletal populations show different types

of cranial modification, so it's probably not associated

with elite but other types of expression of identity.

So how did these curious-looking people live?

Early in their culture they began as fisherman and hunter-gatherers.

But the first major settlements date from around 600 AD.

The Taino's ancestors began to give up their hand-to-mouth existence

and built villages.

Here they interacted on a daily basis, beginning to share

not only resources, but ideas, values and customs.

From these,

the distinctive Taino culture began to emerge around 900 AD.

On the palm-fringed east coast of the Dominican Republic, my friend

and colleague, Alice Samson,

has been excavating a newly discovered site.

-Welcome to the village.

-How're you doing?

This is one of the largest Taino settlements

ever found in the Caribbean.

And yet, at first, there doesn't seem much to see.

Looking at the trees, it's really hard to see what was actually here.

Pre-Columbian, Caribbean culture is built with organic

materials - wood, leaves, thatch, that kind of thing -

so everything basically degrades and the only thing that is left behind

are the durable artefacts like shell and pottery and things like that.

Where would the houses have been?

We're in one right now. You see this depression here,

this would have possibly been the centre of a house,

about six to ten metres in diameter.

-Six to ten metres? That's like...

-So we're now standing on the walls.

The walls would have been made of tropical hardwood poles

with a thatched roof, a small doorway, would have housed

a multi-generational family, maybe six to ten people.

People would have slung their hammocks between the poles

in the house, they would have slept there. They also would have received

guests to the house, maybe consulted their ancestors, carried out

healing rituals, that kind of thing.

These were multi-functional arenas.

These barely perceptible little habitation mounds are not the sort

of spectacular archaeological sites that tourists flock to.

But whilst there's not much to see on the surface, Alice's discoveries

are providing evidence of a thriving community early in Taino culture.

Well, this particular place runs for almost

a kilometre along the coast, and maybe 100 to 200 metres inland,

so we call them villages.

They were towns.

If this was a site in medieval Europe, this would be a city.

Whilst the sheer scale of the settlement is striking,

smaller artefacts now being unearthed provide more evidence

of how advanced the Taino were.

All the things you see here are everyday household items,

so we have pieces of pottery, for example, these two pottery faces

would have decorated maybe a bowl or a household vessel.

People in pre-Columbian villages were very house-proud.

Their houses were the arena of aesthetic elaborations.

People had beautiful things in their houses,

beautifully-crafted objects, they didn't just save these things

for special occasions like burials or ceremonies.

What's that piece there?

This is beautiful. This is a little adorno, so it's a decorative handle

for a pottery vessel and it's in the form of a pelican,

so people were depicting on their household utensils things

that they saw in the environment around them. If you look along

the coast here, you've got pelicans flying by every few minutes.

And this is the quintessential pre-Columbian household item.

A fragment of a ceramic griddle.

A ceramic griddle is the ultimate pre-Columbian cooking vessel.

Recent research done by colleagues

in the Caribbean has shown that they were used for cooking everything on.

Living in settled, larger groups poses challenges.

Most importantly, how to provide food

and sustenance for so many people.

According to the Spanish chronicles, the Taino grew corn,

sweet potato and cassava.

Cassava is extremely nutritious and hardy.

It can be left in the ground for three years without spoiling.

They used rough coral or even sharks' teeth

to grind the cassava into flour and then bake into bread.

Now, as then, cassava bread remains a staple food in the Caribbean.

This is one of the Cassava pancakes fresh off the oven.

It's delicious. It's like lightly-fried garlic bread.

This one's been mixed with a bit of peanut. It's fantastic.

They bring it in, they grind up the cassava,

pile it up in that little tub, put it down here on top of the oven

and then toast it up and sell it just out in the shop on the road.

Lean times were rare.

The subtropical forests of these islands were a rich larder

of vegetables, small animals and fruit.

And, of course, the crystal clear waters of the Caribbean also

provided resources that the indigenous inhabitants exploited.

Being an island, the Taino had aquaculture

as well as agriculture

and, just as they did on land, they showed great skill

understanding an ability to harness the best of their environment.

They could capture fish and turtles in their hundreds,

preserve and store them for the future and, just like island peoples

all around the world, the seas were just as important as the lands.

Just as the Taino did hundreds of years ago,

free divers in the Dominican Republic

still collect food from the seabed.

And, being characteristically innovative,

they didn't waste the remains.

This a conch. It's an almost totemic creature here in the Caribbean.

Of course, people eat the flesh within its shell.

But the conch itself was always much more than just a source of food.

After extracting the meat, the Taino dumped the shells

in huge shell middens along the shore.

After all, ancient free divers didn't want to plunge to

the bottom of the ocean only to pick up empty shells.

But they didn't throw them all away.

The conch was a resource that allowed people to innovate,

to create artefacts, to develop a shared material culture.

They used them to make jewellery, harpoons, axes

and even this, this iconic object of the Caribbean, the conch trumpet.

I've borrowed this one from the Museo de Altos de Chavon

and I'll see if it makes a sound.

CONCH REVERBERATES

The shells, the abundance of food and medicinal plants,

clusters of beach-side villages, the lack of evidence of violence.

It's a combination that paints an idyllic picture.

It's seductive to think of this happy culture, secluded in these

island paradises but that implies that they're isolated, curtailed,

cut off - that noble savage

so popular in romantic Victorian literature.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

It's important to remember that this is an archipelago,

a string of islands.

For Taino culture to have spread across the Caribbean,

sea transportation was essential.

They had a word for it - canoa.

The Taino were a water-borne people

and when you can travel distances great and small in a canoe,

it shifts your boundaries, expands your horizons.

The canoa for Taino society meant that they scarcely differentiated

between land and water.

And far from being a barrier, these rivers, these seas

were a gateway, a super highway connecting the communities together.

So interaction could happen and culture spread,

not just between villages, but between islands.

The inhabitants of the larger islands -

now known as Jamaica, Cuba and Hispaniola - shared common beliefs

and practices, which we broadly call Taino.

And far from separating them, the Caribbean Sea brought them together.

We've seen where the Taino believed they came from,

how they looked, what they ate and how they travelled.

But what about how they actually functioned as a society?

I've come to the Museo del Hombre in the capital

of Santo Domingo to find out.

The Spanish chronicles described the Taino as being egalitarian,

all working in the fields,

but the reality is they did have leaders.

Each village had their own chief and that chief was called a cacique.

The caciques were village elders, part leader, part chief,

part priest.

And they could be male or female.

They ran the village, making the crucial decisions,

distributing food,

forming political alliances and organising daily activities.

Interestingly, after death,

their importance to the community continued.

Because the caciques' most vital function was spiritual,

they weren't seen as gods themselves, but it was believed

the caciques could commune with their spirits

in a quite extraordinary way.

Evidence of how these Taino deities manifested themselves is found

just a short flight away on the neighbouring island of Puerto Rico.

Puerto Rico is the furthest east of the major islands of the Caribbean.

It's home to some of the finest surviving Taino sites and artefacts.

And these artefacts give us

a clearer picture of the Taino hierarchy.

The villages were ruled by chieftains known as caciques

and the caciques were ruled by gods known as cemis.

The Taino believed that the cemis were spirits

found in the environment, that they were supernatural,

and that they guided and advised the Taino people.

They could be forces of nature, cave paintings or almost any

material object that the Taino believed possessed a spirit.

But most commonly,

they were represented in these beautifully-carved stone icons.

Some of the most spectacular cemis where found at one

of the earliest ceremonial sites uncovered in Puerto Rico - Tibes.

Throughout the Caribbean, archaeological sites have

produced portable little artefacts like this and larger, immovable

artefacts like this.

Let me put some water on it so you can see.

Both of these are cemis. The Taino believed that they were

infused with a life force making them sacred.

These cemis connected the physical and spiritual worlds together.

For the Taino, these simple yet striking objects

and motifs were part icon, part deity.

I asked Antonio Curet to be my guide to the enigmatic cemis,

found here at Tibes.

This is a traditional cemi and you can see

the concave shape on the bottom, but traditionally

if they have some carving you have a face on one side, you have

the mountain tree or the yucca and then you have the legs on the back.

And the face, we have the empty eye sockets,

and the empty mouth. The chance is they had encrustations here

made of shell, sometimes in other objects we find gold

or it could be other stones so it might have been different things.

Is the cemi the object or is the cemi the spirit within it?

The cemi is both, it's both. The object becomes the cemi

and the cemi is almost considered like an individual with its own

identity and it's the spirit and the rock.

The cemis were the spiritual link between the Taino people,

the Taino chiefs and the Taino deities.

They came in many different forms, some carried around,

consulted, others worshipped in sacred sites.

The Taino believed these objects had supernatural power.

But they also served a practical purpose.

Each cemi had particular allegories, stories

and associations that were known and re-told among the community.

And within an oral culture, parables that are passed down through

the generations are a crucial way of sharing knowledge.

Within the Taino these cemis actually form a really

important way of learning about their environment, learning

about their ancestors, learning about their own society.

In a way, it's a form of education that can pass through generations.

It's looking back to move forward, basically.

This is true of many religions around the world.

Jesus behave...told us how to behave. He's coming from

the supernatural and this happens with many other religions.

It is indicating what is the order that we should be having here

is the same as up there.

In villages, at ceremonial centres,

the stories of the cemis would have been recounted, from the cacique

to the people of the village, from one generation to the next.

It's a culture of oral history

and the stories of the cemis were critical to the Taino,

because they could help them understand their environment.

Each of the cemis had an associated parable,

and that parable could impart advice and wisdom

and in the Caribbean, the spirits can be very threatening indeed.

HURRICANE HOWLS

The word "hurricane" is derived from the Taino word "hurukan",

which described the violent wrath of the spirits.

Every year the Caribbean is battered by winds of over 100mph.

Crops, canoes and villages can be destroyed in an instant.

To this day, insurance companies class hurricanes as acts of God.

But whilst some Taino spirits unleashed destruction,

others gave direction.

The stories associated with the cemis,

and passed down through the generations,

taught the people how to survive.

They knew to build houses that could be easily reconstructed

and to seek refuge in the caves.

The Taino actually had three cemis associated with the hurricane -

Guatauba, Guabancex and Coatrisque.

Each of these cemis has an associated parable,

which explains their role in the process of the hurricane -

Guatauba, the swirling winds, Guabancex, represented here

in this pictograph,

which is the destructive force of the hurricane

and Coatrisque, which represents the post-hurricane flooding.

Each Taino would have known these parables

and understood the stories behind them.

So when they saw the swirling skies of Guatauba they would come here

and have refuge in the cave before the destructive winds

of Guabancex would destroy their lands.

The cemis provided a way for very practical knowledge to be

passed from one generation to the next.

But for the Taino, of course,

this was inextricable from their religious beliefs.

And when they worshipped their gods,

they put on equally elaborate ceremonies.

-Hola!

-Hola! Como estas?

-Muy bien.

I've come to the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriquena in San Juan

to see an artefact that was part throne, part seat,

and part-time machine.

The duho stool.

So this is a duho, which is

a seat or a stool for the cacique or chief within the Taino society.

The caciques sat on these stools to commune with their gods.

One perspective that is interesting is it gives you

a slight elevation within a group, which can be linked to

a sense of hierarchy, a sense of power.

And also the iconography is often representative of the idea

of a journey between the realm of the present, the realm of the past

and the realm of the future.

Helping them on that journey is this throne.

But just sitting on the duho stool wasn't enough for the cacique

to be transported to the realm of the ancestors.

There was an elaborate ritual that he or she had to perform each time.

The clue to what was involved is in another artefact.

These rather ornate objects were used to prepare the caciques

to meet their cemis.

Before sitting down on their duhos, they would want to

purge themselves - that is, rid their bodies of impurities.

They would do this by putting these sticks down their throats

to make themselves vomit.

Sitting on their duho stool and purged of impurities,

the Taino caciques were ready to meet their spirits.

And to do this, they took a powerful hallucinogenic drug.

I've come to a sacred Taino spot, where I'm meeting Martin Veguilla.

THEY SPEAK SPANISH

Martin is a 21st-century cacique,

part of a new Taino movement for Puerto Ricans keen to reconnect

with the traditions, beliefs and culture of their ancestors.

The Taino drug that empowered the spirits to speak

was called cohoba.

It was made by drying the seeds from the cohoba tree

and crushing them into a potent snuff-like powder.

Over the years, Martin has pieced together fragments

of oral history to recreate this sacred ceremony.

As a cacique, Martin has experienced cohoba before,

and today, based on his experiences,

he and his companions are re-enacting the rarely-seen ritual.

We're preparing for the cohoba ceremony

here on the banks of the river.

These guys are preparing themselves with body paints.

Cohoba is incredibly painful to snort and extremely potent,

so today they are not taking the drug but basing their reactions

on their cacique's own experiences and ancestral precedents.

The Taino believe that if you actually take cohoba,

you enter the ancestral realm of the spirit world.

RHYTHMIC DRUMBEAT

They have this rhythmic music and it all helps to create this

atmosphere on the journey of the hallucinogenic trance.

This helps in that process of travelling

yourself between the different dimensions.

ISOLATED SCREAMS

Taking cohoba results in vivid visions, altered colours

and skewed perceptions of time.

ISOLATED SCREAMS

Hallucinogens are a big part of indigenous cultures

throughout the Americas and it's about the ability to

transcend time and place, to be able to travel back to your ancestors

and also to your descendants, to communicate and create

a balance and understanding between the generations.

These frenzied, hallucinogenic rituals took place on a large scale.

Each intoxicated celebration saw hundreds of Taino joining together,

convinced that spirits had come alive and were dancing among them.

The Taino party for mighty cemis

and mere mortals took place in the heart of Puerto Rico

at the most significant Taino site in the Caribbean.

This site reveals the Taino as a culture bursting with ideas

and energy.

A place where people would gather from all over the island.

The centre of the Taino world. This is Caguana.

Rediscovered in 1915, archaeologists think that this site played

a critical role in the Taino world.

There are ten plazas, including a vast central court

surrounded by carved images of the cemis.

Shards of pottery found here suggest it was in continuous use

for nearly 500 years before the Spanish arrived.

This was a critical centre of power that witnessed spectacular

ceremonies to unite the people, the caciques and the cemi gods.

I met up with the man who first taught me

Caribbean archaeology, my former tutor, Jose Olivier, to discuss the

mysterious and bizarre ceremonies that went on here at Caguana.

We are lucky that we have enough information from contact period,

that is about 1508, when the Spanish arrived here,

that spaces like these that we have over in this area,

which are the central part of the site,

are described in a detailed way what sorts of activities took place here.

So this is the place... This whole area is where

the chant and dances took place

and what's really interesting is how strictly controlled was

the choreography. They would follow exactly what

the leader of the dance would do, which means it was an idealised

representation of how society should work - it should work on step.

So at Caguana we're seeing cemis, we're seeing caciques,

we're seeing duhos, we're seeing the dances. We're seeing it all

come together as part of a big central ceremony.

That's what it was.

It was a major spectacle, it was also a spiritual experience.

It was, in essence, the biggest party you can imagine.

I can see groups of long lines of people chanting, dancing,

I can see all of this iridescent feathers moving out,

with the resplendent necklaces.

It must have been quite a sight to see.

Hundreds of spectacularly-dressed Taino,

in a carefully choreographed dance with their chiefs,

would have reinforced a sense of togetherness and belonging.

But the climax of the ceremony was when the spirits themselves

seemed to come alive and left their stones to dance among them.

I think that these icons that you see here,

were not just merely decorations for the festival

but they're actually in many ways participants in this festival.

They used the hallucinogenic drug known as cohoba

and that already creates, animates the images -

so these images you can imagine they begin to get vitality,

move around in your eyes and so they became, at certain moments,

part of the whole festivity that was taking place here.

Vomiting, multiple gods

and drug-infused hallucinations might appear peculiar practices.

But these ceremonies forged social cohesion, community,

shared values and interdependency.

And the Taino flourished.

By the 15th century, some estimates put

the Taino population on Hispaniola alone at around one million people.

And from the Bahamas to the Virgin Islands, there was a mosaic

of peoples and places who all shared the traits of Taino culture.

There were differences from island to island.

SHE SPEAKS SPANISH

But what's amazing is that, in a society that only had

the humble canoe for transport, there was significant ethnic mix.

HE SPEAKS SPANISH

And we know this thanks to modern archaeological techniques.

Strontium isotope analysis is basically just looking

at the chemical signature of our bones.

These strontium isotope analyses can tell where we are as children

by the chemical signature of our teeth

and it can tell where we are as adults and where we are when we die

by the chemical signature of some of our long bones.

So we can start to reconstruct exactly where people are born,

where they live and where they die.

And what is unique about the Caribbean is just the sheer scale

of interaction and movement of people throughout these islands.

What this tells me

is that the Taino are a multiethnic society, that people are coming

from all over the region and mixing their communities together.

Caribbean archaeology constantly surprises.

The numerous communities across the archipelago were united

by many of the same beliefs and ceremonial practices.

Yet there were also significant differences.

But the constant movement of people

was like a cultural cross-fertilisation

that gave these islands a rich, multiethnic character.

You have to see them as connected communities, intermingling

and enriching one another.

For thousands of years, the people of these islands were

interacting, intermarrying and trading.

And all of the archaeological evidence suggests that far from

being isolated,

these islands were full of diverse

and multiethnic communities for millennia.

The 15th century saw the high point

but also the final days of the cosmopolitan Taino.

Despite being marginalised by the history books, the Taino have left

a legacy in the Caribbean, a part of the world known for its diversity.

WAVE CRASHES

On the south coast of Puerto Rico,

in a sea cave surrounded by an eclectic array of petroglyphs,

I met with my compadre and fellow archaeologist,

Reniel Rodriguez Ramos, to celebrate the importance of the Taino.

But I began by asking

whether a culture shaped across differing islands

meant that they could all be categorised as Taino?

For me, this notion of Taino as a society, as a single entity,

is not necessarily appropriate. I think that the essence of what

I call Taino-ness, is a context of different peoples engaging

with one another while retaining their differences.

That's something that we in the modern society tend to forget

and so that perhaps serves as an example

of how in a multicultural setting

we can still find ways to communicate with one another,

to cooperate with one another

in order to be successful as a collective.

The Taino people - or perhaps that should be peoples -

spoke different languages throughout the islands.

But remarkably, and significantly,

when they encountered one another, they spoke a common tongue.

People talked a single language. It's the language they talked

to outsiders - the Arawak - and that's why

when they write, they think everyone spoke Arawak in the Caribbean, no?

It's the language that you speak to outsiders, much like English

is being used today to engage with people from other areas.

That's why I think that this indigenous cultural scape served as

a substratum for the Caribbean that we see at this point in time.

Reniel is a brilliant archaeologist and just as importantly,

a proud Puerto Rican.

And throughout the Caribbean the story of the Taino is

growing in significance.

WAVE CRASHES

Why do you want to study the Taino and what have you've really

got out of the experience of studying this culture?

Well, the way I engage with this indigenous past...

..is in the sense that I'm trying to trace back my own history.

And so I think that, in a way, that allows me

to provide historical roots to the people of Puerto Rico that go

back deep in time. Right now in Puerto Rico we are told

that we only have 500 years of history and that's not true.

All that indigenous past is part of our history. It's not

written in the same way as Europeans wrote it but it's actually portrayed

in the rock art, in the artefacts that we study as archaeologists.

In October 1492, three Spanish ships appeared over the horizon.

The Taino people, the Caribbean,

the Americas were on the verge of traumatic change.

History didn't begin with the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

But when he walked ashore, nothing would ever be the same again.

Columbus arrived in the New World

and decreed that this island should be called Hispaniola, meaning

"Land of the Spanish". First contact Between the Old World and the New.

It's an era-defining moment, the repercussions of which are still

reverberating down through the centuries.

By the Spaniards' own accounts, the Taino people received

the Europeans with generosity and kindness.

Indeed Columbus himself wrote, "They were very friendly to us

"and became wonderfully attached to us."

More ominously he noted, "They should be good servants."

Christopher Columbus's name has been translated by some as

"Christ-bearing Coloniser".

Perhaps it should be no surprise he wanted to claim gold for Spain,

and to leave a Christian God for the indigenous peoples.

He founded the first ever European settlement

in the Americas, La Isabella, on the north coast of Hispaniola.

Just inland, an exciting project is excavating indigenous sites

along Columbus's route.

I spoke to archaeologist Corine Hoffman about the collision

between Europe and the so-called New World.

This is the first region of the encounters of the Americas

and nothing is known about this region, nothing is

known about its people, therefore it's really, really important.

The encounter is always seen as this moment of disease,

of slavery, of rapid depopulation. Do you think that message is true?

That message is partly true.

I think that the encounter had

a dramatic impact on the indigenous populations of the Americas -

decimation of language, of culture, of people, of identities.

The Taino initially welcomed the tall, strange white men.

But the relationship between the islanders

and the Spanish quickly turned sour.

The Spanish had swords, horses, ferocious dogs,

all of which they used against the unprepared islanders.

Columbus and his followers showed no mercy for the culture

they encountered.

To this day there are still statues in the Puerto Rican capital,

which credit the invading Spanish with populating the island.

Perhaps this is due to the chronicles

they left behind about their conquest, which painted

the invaders as patriotic Christian heroes with noble motives.

What do you think the Spanish used to justify

their domination of these islands?

When they came across the first Taino village, what did they see and

how did they use what they saw to justify what they were going to do?

Well, I guess that the most important thing is

they were explaining to the Spanish court that they were

encountering savages, cannibals, wild people, useless people

and that was their legitimation. They asked for legitimation to be

able to continue their colonisation of the Caribbean and later of

the Americas.

The only thing that the Spanish wanted, of course, was gold

because that was their prime search here and they couldn't find it.

Changing our understanding of that indigenous perspective can really

play into modern day education of communities here.

Absolutely. The strange thing is that even if you would ask

people in this region about their knowledge about the

pre-Columbian period, they would say,

"For us, history begins in 1492."

The history that is still taught in schools in

the Dominican Republic but all over the Caribbean is still about

the savage Indians and that is an image we have to deconstruct.

For 60 years following contact,

the Spanish attacked then subjugated the Taino.

Important caciques were drowned, hanged or burned at the stake.

Cemis were destroyed in the name of Christianity.

The chronicles tell us

horror stories of a female chief known as Anacoaona,

forced to witness 80 of her fellow caciques being burned alive.

It was decreed that any Taino who refused to convert to

Christianity was to be enslaved.

By 1504, just 12 years after first contact,

all the caciques who had originally welcomed Columbus were dead.

It was a barbaric pattern that would be repeated across the Americas.

It's a horrific story,

and it's arguable if these islands ever fully recovered.

The Taino were killed, forced to work in gold mines,

died of disease, subjugated into slavery.

The Taino and their entire way of life was on the edge of extinction.

For many years, historians assumed that the Taino had disappeared,

that they had died within a century of the Spaniards' arrival.

But just as the Europeans didn't discover the Taino culture,

nor should they declare it extinct.

500 years after their presumed demise,

interest in the Taino has never been greater.

In 2003 a genetic survey of the people of Puerto Rico

revealed that 61% of the population showed traces of indigenous DNA.

In other words, remnants of Taino DNA.

And in recent years, on sacred days of the Taino calendar,

the people of these islands have been rediscovering

their historic roots and taking pride in their indigenous identity.

-I am proud to be a Taino.

-Soy Taino.

-We're Taino.

Soy Taino.

I am from New York and I am Taino.

Soy Taino.

RHYTHMIC DRUMBEAT

There's something incredibly moving about seeing people reconnecting

with the ancient traditions of their ancestors.

RHYTHMIC DRUMBEAT

And in many ways,

pre-Columbian Caribbean history is still up for grabs.

By re-enacting ancient Taino ceremonies, these modern

Puerto Ricans are at last beginning to take pride in their own story,

and retelling it in their own way.

THEY CHEER AND PLAY INSTRUMENTS

CONCH REVERBERATES

THEY CHEER

George Orwell said that the most effective way to destroy a people

is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

For too long, the story of the Taino has been told through

Western eyes, as if it wasn't valid

unless it was observed by people of European descent.

But with the resurgence of interest in the Taino culture

and appreciation of the sustainable way

in which they managed their resources,

an understanding that ideas,

goods, genetics have been mixing here for thousands of years.

It enriches everyone on these islands and serves

as a cautionary tale

about just how fragile an idyllic island life can be.