Afro-Caribbean History · Unit 1
Before the Plantation: Indigenous Caribbean Societies and First Contact
The Taino and Kalinago peoples who lived in the Caribbean before it became a plantation economy, and what happened to them
Learning Objectives
- •Students will be able to describe the distinct political and social structures of the Taino and Kalinago peoples prior to European contact.
- •Students will analyze how the encomienda system, European disease, and armed resistance combined to produce the catastrophic Taino population collapse under Spanish rule.
- •Students will explain why Spain had already introduced enslaved African labor to Jamaica roughly a century before the 1655 English takeover, and connect this to the island's later plantation economy.
- •Students will evaluate evidence for Indigenous Caribbean survival, including linguistic, genetic, and community-based evidence, against the older narrative of total Taino extinction.
Unit 1 Knowledge Check
Score 70% or higher to complete this unit. Answers stay hidden until you submit.
1. What does the etymology of the word 'maroon' reveal about the relationship between Indigenous and African resistance in the Caribbean?
2. Why is Jamaica's Spanish colonial period (1494-1655) especially significant for understanding the later British plantation system there?
3. What combination of factors caused the catastrophic decline of the Taino population under Spanish rule?
4. How did the political structures of the Taino and Kalinago societies differ?