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Mediterraneans 83
sea, and the middens containing hundreds of thousands of
shellfish remains provide rich archaeological evidence of this
dependency. Florida itself closes off a second space, the Gulf of
Mexico, which forms a second Mediterranean; this, however,
seems to have been a quieter area from the perspective of
maritime contacts in the pre-Columbian period, even if around
its shores some sophisticated cultures had developed. Thus, as
with the ancient Mediterranean, we can speak of a double area
partly closed off by a major island (in this case, Cuba), in which
commercial activity was more intense in one area than in another.
In Pre-Columbian times, this area had further characteristics
of a Mediterranean, as migrants moved up the chain of islands,
with Taínos moving north from the Arawak lands of presentday
Venezuela and the Guianas, displacing the more primitive,
possibly legendary, Ciboneys, who were supposedly pushed
into the western extremities of Cuba; and with Caribs raiding
into the islands, spreading fear with their propensity for
fattening up male captives and feasting on human meat (hence
the new meaning of their corrupted name, cannibals). To Columbus
and his Italian contemporaries Amerigo Vespucci and
Peter Martyr, thinking in the black-and-white terms then current
in the original Mediterranean from which they came, the
Taínos were the victims of a sort of Carib jihad, and the answer
was to win permission for the war against the Caribs to be
classed as a holy war. But this image of conflict has been subtly
modified by scholars, some of whom have been deeply doubtful
(too much so, probably) about the veracity of tales of maneating
Caribs; in any case, a new consensus reveals that Caribs
and Taínos shared more cultural attributes than had been assumed.
Nor were the Taínos themselves entirely homogeneous.
Most archaeologists attribute a higher level of technology and
more elaborate social institutions to the ‘Classic Taínos’ of the
larger islands, especially Hispaniola, while those who first
greeted Columbus, the Lucayan Indians of the Bahamas,
appear to have lived in less complex societies, even though
they had contact with the ‘Classic Taínos’. As far as evidence
for state formation is concerned, we can observe small political
entities on the bigger islands, dividing up the territory (sometimes
in rivalry with one another); large political entities