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Lecture: Pre-Columbian populations and societies

‘The islands of the Caribbean remained uninhabited longer than almost any other of the world’s major resource-rich regions’ (Higman, 2011, p. 9). This lecture considers the peopling of the Caribbean region and the nature of the societies that were established there prior to the arrival to Europeans.

Reading list

Abulafia, David, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, CT, 2008).

Boucher, Philip P., Cannibal Encounters: Europeans and Island Caribs, 1492-1763 (Baltimore, 1992).

Castanha, Tony, The myth of indigenous Caribbean extinction: Continuity and reclamation in Boriken (Puerto Rico) (Basingstoke, 2011).

* Curet, L. Antonio, ‘The Earliest Settlers’ in Stephan Palmié and Francisco A. Scarano (eds), The Caribbean: A History of the Region and its Peoples (Chicago, 2011), pp. 53-67.

Heuman, Gad, The Caribbean (London, 2006), chapter 1.

Higman, Barry W., A Concise History of the Caribbean (Cambridge, 2011), chapter 2.

Hofman, Corinne L. et al., 'Ties with the homelands: Archipelgaic interaction and the enduring role of the South and Central American mainlands in the pre-Columbia Lesser Antilles' in L. Antonio Curet and Mark W. Hauser (eds), Islands at the crossroads: Migration, seafaring, and interaction in the Caribbean (Tuscaloosa, 2011), pp 73-86.

Honychurch, L. ‘Cultural formations in the Caribbean’ in Skelton, Tracy (ed.), Introduction to the Pan-Caribbean (London, 2004), pp. 154-172.

Hulme, Peter and Whitehead, Neil L. (eds), Wild Majesty: Encounters with Caribs from Columbus to the Present Day - An Anthology (Oxford, 1992).

Knight, Franklin W., The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism (2nd edition, Oxford, 1990), pp. 3-26.

Martin, Tony, Caribbean History: From Pre-colonial Origins to the Present (London, 2012), chapter 1.

Richardson, Bonham C., The Caribbean in the Wider World, 1492-1992: A Regional Geography (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 13-37.

Stannard, D. E., American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (Oxford, 1992), pp. 57-75.

Sued-Badillo, Jalil (ed.), General History of the Caribbean I: Autochthonous Societies (London, 2003).

Sued-Badillo, Jalil, ‘The Indigenous Societies at the time of Conquest’ in Jalil Sued-Badillo (ed.), General History of the Caribbean I: Autochthonous Societies (London, 2003), pp. 259-291.

Wilson, Samuel M. (ed.), The Indigenous People of the Caribbean (Gainesville, 1997).

On the indigenous populations of the Caribbean in the present day…

Castanha, Tony, The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction: Continuity and Reclamation in Boriken (Puerto Rico) (Basingstoke, 2011).

Forte, Maximilian C. (ed.), Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival (New York; Oxford, 2006).

Web resources

http://archaeology.about.com/od/northamerica/a/Caribbean-Archaeology.htm

http://www.nexus1492.eu