INDIAN CULTURES OF NORTHEASTERN SOUTH 



AMERICA 



By Hejrbert W. Krieger 

 United States National Museum 



[With 12 plates] 

 NATIVE TRIBES AND LANGUAGES 



Indian tribes occiipyinc: northeastern South America come roughly 

 within a grouping consisting of four large linguistic stocks — the 

 Tupi, the Tapuya, the Arawak, the Carib — and of several smaller 

 ones. The checkered geographic arrangement of two of these, the 

 Arawak and Carib in northern South America, east of the Andes, is 

 remarkable. Various theories have been developed to account for 

 this. The most widely accepted and most plausible theory, although 

 not necessarily the most correct one, is that as the Caribs were war- 

 like and the Arawaks peaceful, they were continually engaged in 

 warfare and migrations, with the Arawaks in the lead closely fol- 

 lowed by marauding bands of Caribs. Perhaps the only authority 

 for this is observations made by Spanish explorers on the Lesser An- 

 tilles at the time of their discovery, when the Caribs were actively on 

 the trail of the Arawaks, dispossessing them of their women and 

 driving them out of their island homes. At this time, so it is con- 

 jectured, the Caribs had supplanted the Arawaks in the Lesser An- 

 tilles, an island archipelago which extends all the way from the delta 

 of the great Orinoco River, and the outlying island of Trinidad in 

 the Gulf of Paria on the Venezuelan coast, to Vieques just east of 

 Puerto Rico. 



Undoubtedly several explanatory factors in addition to the harass- 

 ment of war should be taken into consideration in accounting for 

 the widely scattered Arawak and Carib tribes in the South American 

 mainland north of the Amazon. Many of the early documents and 

 narratives treating with tribal distribution in tropical South America 

 refer to tribes no longer occupying the areas mentioned in those 

 accounts. In other words, the displacement forces are still at work. 



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