April 8, 2023 Professor Peter E. Siegel, Montclair State University: “The Taínos of the Caribbean: History and Ancestry of the First Indigenous People Encountered by Christopher Columbus.”
Early in the morning of October 12, 1492, Christopher Columbus and his men made landfall on San Salvador, one of the small islands of the Bahamas. Over the next several months, these men traveled to Hispaniola, Cuba, and Puerto Rico and then eventually most of the Caribbean islands. The Indigenous people that Columbus encountered in the northern Caribbean are broadly referred to as the Taíno Indians. Dr. Siegel discussed approximately 9000 years of Caribbean human history, tracing what is known concerning the origins, spread, and sociopolitical developments of the people who occupied the archipelago from Venezuela through the Bahamas. For the final 2000 years of prehistory he presented a cosmological and political trajectory that culminated with the complex Taíno chiefdoms confronted by Columbus. Finally, he considered the Caribbean heritage in the context of 21st -century globalization and geopolitical complexity.
Peter E. Siegel is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and Center for Heritage and Archaeological Studies at Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ, specializing in pre-European cultures of eastern North America, the Caribbean, and lowland South America. His research interests include the evolution of complex societies, the origins and many trajectories of social inequality, village spatial organization and the ritual use of space, heritage management, human-environment relations, ethnoarchaeology, and lithic usewear analysis. Dr. Siegel has conducted ethnoarchaeological fieldwork among the Shipibo Indians of eastern Peru and the Waiwai and Wapisiana Indians of southern Guyana and has directed archaeological projects across much of eastern North America and the Caribbean. He received his BA from the University of Delaware and his MA and PhD from the State University of New York at Binghamton. In addition to many journal articles, his publications include The Archaeology of Native North America (with Dean R. Snow and Nancy Gonlin).
The meeting was online via Zoom. A recorded version is available for Society members at Meeting Archives.