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84 Mediterraneans
comprising a whole major island or a group of minor ones did
not come into being. This is obviously very different from the
centralized states with massive public works (palaces, temples,
great mounds) coming into existence in central America, and as
far south as Peru and as far north as the Mississippi valleys.
Curious, though, is the importance both in Central American
high cultures and in the Caribbean of ceremonial ball games;
maybe this indicates some cultural contact, going back to the
South American origins of the Taínos. Even so, the ball games
played by the Taínos appear to have lacked the intensity of
those of Maya and Aztecs: in the Caribbean they did not result
in the losers being selected for ritual execution, and, at the risk
of oversimplifying what one sees, one could say that they appear
to have had a social but not so much a religious function.
However, what is certain is that news and goods travelled
rapidly along the trade routes. Columbus was surprised to find
that some of the simple trade goods such as hawks’ bells and
buttons that had been handed to the Indians of the Bahamas
actually preceded him on his journey down the edges of the
Caribbean; canoe traffic was fast and intense, and there are
signs that communities traded both luxury goods and basic
foodstuffs, such as manioc, the staple foodstuff of South American
origin whose cultivation spread northwards as the Taíno
Indians moved through the island chain. However, the Florida
Indians did not adopt the distinctive agricultural methods of
South America, relying instead on seed crops of the sort also
cultivated along the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico; in this sense
the Florida Channel, though navigable, constituted a cultural
frontier between two worlds. 7
This was thus a Mediterranean with invisible boundaries.
Moreover, rumours of high civilization which percolated to
Columbus in Hispaniola and Cuba may have been founded on
very little, and were probably not based on any exact knowledge
of the land-based civilizations of Mexico. Even in Veragua,
along the Central American coast, clues to the existence of
city-based cultures with a higher level of technology than that
of the Caribbean Indians were vague; still, by noticing (for
7
Carl E. Sauer, The Early Spanish Main (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1966),
51–3.