U.S. Virgin Islands Early History
Historians document that the first inhabitants, the Ciboneys, arrived on the islands during what is considered the Pre-Ceramic Culture. Long before the birth of Christ, seafaring people using stone tools and bone implements hacked logs into canoes, swam, and fished in the clear waters of the Virgin Islands. The first humans arrived in the Virgin Islands between 1000 BC to 200 BC. This time period was called the Archaic Age. The oldest site found on St. John is just off the beach at Lameshur Bay. South Americans settled the island about 1300 to 2500 years ago and their villages have been found at Cinnamon Bay, Coral Bay, Caneel Bay and Lameshur Bay.
Arawaks were the next to arrive, establishing sites on St. John and St. Croix around 100 AD. By the 2nd century AD, peaceful Arawak villagers were living at Coral Bay, Cruz Bay, and Cinnamon Bay on St. John. Later, tribes of tall black-haired people from South America — farmers, pottery makers, warriors, and rock carvers — drifted with the winds and current through the curving necklace of islands now called the Lesser Antilles. In time, seafaring Carib people ranging up through the island chain took their toll of the Arawaks and established scattered outposts in the Virgin Islands.
Probably the best-known inhabitants, and those to arrive next, were the fierce Caribs and the more peaceful Tainos. Evidence of their time in the islands has been unearthed in recent years, and includes stone griddles, zemis (small carvings depicting the faces of their gods) and petroglyphs which are rock carvings visible on St. John’s Reef Bay Trail.
The Tainos discovered St. John around 1000 AD. There was a population explosion about 1000 to 1300 years ago and prehistoric villages were established on most of the beaches of St. John. Taino (pronounced Ty-ee-no) were the Pre-Columbian (an era of 700-1500 AD) indigenous people on St. John. They were categorized as Classic Taino (located in Hispaniola or the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands), based on their culture, agricultural and worship practices. Other categories include Eastern (in the lesser Antilles) and Western (Bahamas, Cuba and Jamaica) Taino.
Significant prehistoric sites are present on almost every beach and in every bay. These archeological sites date from as early as 840 BC to the arrival of Columbus. There are early nomadic hunter-gatherer Archaic Period sites, followed by early chiefdom villages, then complex ceremonial sites and each with their own burial grounds. These sites have given us a greater understanding of this Caribbean region’s prehistory, and the religious and social development of the Taino culture that greeted Columbus.
Within the deep interior of the Reef Bay valley rests one of St. John’s most important clues to a lost culture from the island’s past, the petroglyphs. This captivating place is located at the base of the valley’s highest waterfall, surrounded by the island’s lush tropical vegetation. Here, mysterious faces are found carved into the fall’s blue basalt rock. A spring fed pool beneath reflects a 20-foot wide panorama of carvings year-round with other petroglyphs visible nearby. For those who may be unfamiliar with the term petroglyph, the term petroglyph refers to rock art carvings whereas pictographs are rock art paintings.
Throughout the Caribbean, petroglyphs are discovered in caves and along riverbanks. Just off St. John at the somewhat unapproachable east end of Congo Cay, they are carved into the stone slab near the tip of the island. In the Greater Antilles they are most abundant. On the larger islands of Puerto Rico and Hispaniola similar carvings are found on slabs of stone that enclose plazas or ball courts obviously designed for ceremonial events and games.
These people advanced from a simple society, like that found at Trunk Bay (circa AD 900), to the complex hierarchial society that greeted Columbus into the Americas. Taino ancestral worship had evolved to empower an elite lineage. The study of the ceramic imagery from St. John demonstrates a probable scenario as to how the chiefly power was acquired over time and retained through a process of religious manipulations of existing beliefs in ancestor rites by controlling the religious structure and symbols to legitimize the elite authority. Central to the argument is that ceramic imagery on offering vessels depicts how and when the emerging elites enhance the established ancestral cult by introducing a visual manifestation into the natural world that has a dual connection to the supernatural world.
The Caribs had taken control of St. Croix, then called Ay Ay, when Christopher Columbus sailed into Salt River on his second voyage in 1493, claiming the islands for Spain. The battle between the Indians and Columbus is considered the first insurgence in the New World.
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