Jamaica

Near the city of Kingston, at the entrance of the Port Royal bay, travelers find the ruins of the old city destroyed by an earthquake in 1692.The Arawacks, an American Indian people whose many tribes originally inhabited an area comprising Florida, the West Indies and the Brazilian shoreline all the way down to southern Brazil. The group belongs to a Arawckan linguistic family. Arawcks were the first indigenous people of the American mainland, the ones found by Christopher Columbus in 1492.A considerable part of the Arawcks vanished some centuries ago. The Arawcks than inhabited the Lesser Antilles were submitted during the wars against the Caribes in the late 15th Century. In the early 16th Century, the Arawckan population in the West Indies faded out in millions and it had already been killed off by the turn of the century. This catastrophic death rate stemmed in part from the appearance of European diseases –ailments and illnesses Arawcks were not immune to. The end of the food supplies, slavery and cruelty imposed by the Spanish rule also took their toll in their population. Before the Spanish conquest, environmental systems of the Greater Islands with its plentiful harvests and fishing, teamed with a compact and steady population, helped the fostering of a developed political and social structure. A lineage of offspring chiefs ruled the remaining three groups, and slaves were the low men in the totem pole. Conflicts among the three groups appeared to be almost none. In this matrilineal society -in which heirs are determined by motherhood- a chief’s heir was the eldest son of his eldest sister’s. Religion represented a deity hierarchy parallel to the social structure.Arawckan groups in South American got by the European contact since their groups were much smaller and more spread. Their social structure was also matrilineal and less complex, though. Mainland Arawcks traded with the Dutch and the British. During the 17th and 18th Centuries, they evolved into a plantation-growing people. In the course of the 20th Century, Arawcks began to take paid jobs in order to make up for the meager benefits out of agriculture, fishing and hunting. Despite the fact that their current culture reflects outer influences, this group has been marked ever since the pre-Hispanic times by its pottery skills, as well as in both wood and metal carving, and fabrics. Nowadays, there are some 30,000 Arawcks in Guyana and smaller populations in Surinam and the French Guyana. Other Arawckan-speaking groups are spread around different parts of South America.