Lucayan people

The Bahamas, 800 CE–1520. Draft, not yet reviewed

The Lucayan people were the Indigenous people of the Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands before the European colonisation of the Americas. Sometime between 500 and 800 CE, Taínos began crossing in dugout canoes from Hispaniola or Cuba to the Bahamas. The Lucayans expanded throughout the Bahamas Islands in some 800 years, growing to a population of about 40,000. Shortly after contact, the Spanish kidnapped and enslaved Lucayans, and the displacement ended in the complete eradication of the Lucayan people from the Bahamas by 1520.

Seat of power: Lucayan Archipelago

No rulers documented for this era yet.

Culture

• Lucayan society was based on descent through the mother's line, which was typical of Taíno culture as a whole.
• Lucayans, like other Taínos, lived in multi-household houses. Each house sheltered an extended family.
• The staple crop of the Lucayans was manioc, followed by sweet potato. More than 80 percent of the meat in the Lucayan diet came from marine fishes.
• Conch shells were a hard material in plentiful supply on the islands, and Lucayans used them to make tools such as canoe gouges, hoes, hammers, picks, net mesh gauges, and fishhooks.

Picture

Lucayan National Park, on Grand Bahama, has an underwater cave system of charted tunnels.

Image: katiebordner, CC BY 2.0, file

Sources

• Lucayan people (Wikipedia)
• Lucayan people (Wikidata)
• About the picture (Wikipedia)

Text adapted from the Wikipedia articles listed as sources, CC BY-SA 4.0.