The Earliest Inhabitants: The Dynamics of the Jamaican Taino

ters of the caciques. These politically motivated unions were thought to ensure
the cooperation and even subservience of the local Indians. However, multiple
unions of an informal, polygynous nature, between Spanish men of every
social class and Indian women, were more frequently the case in the early
decades of the conquest (Esteva-Fabregat 1995, 34). Whereas family migration
was common among English settlers along the eastern seaboard of North
America in the seventeenth century, the widespread incorporation of
Amerindian women into domestic unions with Spanish settlers gave rise to a
distinct “Spanish Colonial pattern” that is reflected in the archaeological
remains of all contact-period sites (Deagan 1983; McEwan 1995).
By the second decade of the sixteenth century, Santo Domingo, on the
southeast end of the island of Hispaniola, was the main port of call for supply
ships from Spain. Since the prevailing trade winds in the Caribbean come
from the southeast, Jamaica is downwind of Hispaniola. As the island lacked
lucrative mineral resources, there was little reason for trading vessels to visit
the island unless they were already bound for the Central American coast or
were in need of foodstuffs. With the exception of European domestic animals
(which were raised on the island in great numbers) and a small quantity of
Iberian ceramics, Cotter did not recover any glassware, candleholders, clothing
and sewing accessories, personal items, weapons, hooks or ornaments
during his excavation of the fortress. This seems to support the premise that
this isolated colony on the Spanish frontier not only was less well supplied
with European merchandise than other contact-period sites such as Nueva
Cadiz, Puerto Real or even the later settlement of St Augustine (Woodward
1988, 113; McEwan 1995, 216–17), but also had few Hispanic women. As
such, the upper-class inhabitants of the fortress at Sevilla la Nueva were
forced to adapt more fully to their new environment than those residing
closer to the major colonial centres on Hispaniola or even to the rich pearlfishing
colony of Nueva Cadiz, off the coast of Venezuela (McEwan 1995;
Willis 1976).
Conclusion
The high social standing of the inhabitants of the fortress at Sevilla la Nueva
is reflected in their diet and in the presence of majolica tableware and elaborate
architectural ornamentation. The presence of aboriginal ceramics and
the evidence of some aboriginal food-preparation techniques indicate that
local Taíno women were employed in daily domestic activities. It appears
that both the remoteness of this colony and the lack of Spanish women forced
even the highest-status Hispanic settlers to engage in some degree of cultural
mixing.
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