THE EARLY INDIAN CULTURES OF CUBA 



By HERBERT W. KRIEGER 



Curator, Division of Ethnology, U. S. National Museum 



In recent years the Smithsonian Institution has sponsored seven 

 anthropological expeditions to Santo Domingo, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, 

 Haiti, and Cuba, with the purpose of determining prehistoric tribal 

 and cultural sequence in those islands. With a view toward a more 

 detailed analysis of the northern and southern affiliations of early 

 Cuban cultures, the writer visited Cuba and the outlying Isle of Pines 

 during the winter of 1932. This expedition was made possible by the 

 joint cooperation of the Smithsonian Institution with Dr. W. L. 

 Abbott, whose interest in West Indian research is of long standing. 



Solution of two problems was sought: First, who were the Indians 

 at one time occupying the littoral of the southern coast of the province 

 of Camagiiey, the builders of those enormous kitchen refuse heaps 

 and shell deposits known to Cubans as caneyes ? Were they the so- 

 called Ciboneyes described by the Spanish historian Las Casas as 

 simple fishermen living on the smaller islands off the Cuban coast and 

 subject to the recent invader from Haiti — the superior Arawak? 



Second, who were the people occupying western Cuba at the time of 

 its discovery by Columbus? Were they perhaps in contact with the 

 celebrated Maya of Yucatan Peninsula less than 100 miles distant? 

 They certainly knew about the splendors of aboriginal Mexico by 

 hearsay if not through trade and intercourse, for the Spaniards gained 

 their first intimation of the superior mainland cultures from the lowly 

 Indians of northern Cuba. Or were they the selfsame Ciboneyes who, 

 according to the gossiping Martyr, lived in caves and roamed through 

 the mountains of western Cuba? 



There remains yet another theory, namely, that underlying or mar- 

 ginal to our rather elaborate southeastern United States Indian cul- 

 ture is an extremely ancient lacustrine or coastal culture based pre- 

 dominantly on the use of shellfish. This same underlying culture might 

 account for the undifferentiated shell heaps and middens of the 

 Floridan, Bahaman, Cuban, and Haitian coasts ; it is here labeled, ten- 

 tatively, as the Ciboney, so far as pertains to the West Indies. 



The writer's work was confined largely to a study of the caneyes of 

 the Cuban province of Camagiiey, and to a reconnaissance of Pinar 

 del Rio Province and the Isle of Pines. The Isle of Pines is the 

 largest of the outlying keys of Cuba, from which it is separated by 



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