52 ISLAND CULTURE ABEA OF AMERICA [eth. ann.34 



there was a marked difTerence between the historic inhabitants of 

 Haiti-Porto Kico, or the Greater Antilles, and the Lesser Antilles. 

 The former were called Arawak, the latter Carib. The two races 

 were hostile to each other and their culture was similar but not 

 identical. To the historians this was a fact of geographical dis- 

 tribution. They paid no attention to what had been the condition 

 in prehistoric times, or whether the life of the earlier inhabitants 

 from Trinidad to Cuba was ever more uniform than they found it. 

 They recognized, however, that the Carib were a more or less 

 nomadic, while the Arawak or Tainan were a stationary people. A 

 study of prehistoric material here presented supports the belief that 

 the earlier inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles were even more closely 

 allied culturally to those of the Greater Antilles than were the later 

 Carib to the Arawak. The Carib inhabitants of the Lesser Antilles, 

 as we know from both archeology and legend, had submerged the 

 former population as far north as Vieques Island and the east coast 

 of Porto Rico. They were likewise known to all the Greater Antilles, 

 even to the Bahamas, but had not yet overcome and replaced a 

 preexisting Tainan or Arawak popidation. 



In his memoir on " The Aborigines of Porto Rico " ^ the author 

 has shown, as far as possible with limited material, the characteristics 

 of the culture of that prehistoric Antillean life in Porto Rico. In the 

 l^resent article he will try to indicate, mainly from archeological 

 material, the culture of the Lesser Antilles before the advent of the 

 Carib. While it is probably true that many of the older customs and 

 objects belonging to the prehistoric people of the Lesser Antilles sur- 

 vived among the Carib and were in use when these islands were first 

 visited by Europeans, many were not. These objects of a past culture 

 were obsolete and the most exhaustive examination of the literature 

 fails to reveal their probable use. Notwithstanding this uncertainty, 

 however, these objects of stone, clay, wood, or shell are often desig- 

 nated " Carib artifacts," as if made by this vigorous nomadic stock. 

 Many of them are, however, mentioned as in use at this early time 

 by Carib, and as there is a lai-ger literature on Carib than on Arawak 

 ethnology, dating to the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth cen- 

 turies, much information may be gathered by historical methods or 

 examination of documentary accounts of this race. In one or two 

 instances this method is used in the following pages, but the arche- 

 ological or objective method is the one generally employed. 



= Twenty-flfth Ann. Kept. Bur. Amer. Ethn., 1907. 



