Taino Origins
The Andean Culture of the Collas
From: "The Eagle and The Jaguar" - By Antonio Blasini
The precedence of the Taino culture is reaffirmed when we examine the following customs acquired from the Colla tribe. Any theory stating that the Taino is a descendant of the Arawaks is completely discarded with these findings, and other revelations.
1. When a child was born, the Tainos tied a wooden piece to the baby’s head to deform his skull. This ritual, inherited from the Incas, was also performed by the peoples of Tenochtitlan and Copan. The Arawaks never performed this ritual.
2. Ceremonial Burial: This ritual consisted of burying their dead in a fetal position, together with some of his possessions, which the deceased would carry into the better life. The Arawaks cremated their dead, and made a beverage from their ashes, which they drank.
3. The Tainos majestic agricultural and surveying skills inherited from the Collas, as fray Bartolome de las Casas quoted: "To see them working the land, is a wonder". The Arawaks never farmed their lands, even when the missionary priests tried to teach them, they hardly developed any farming skills at all.
4. The Taino ceremonial sport, The game of the Batey, was also part of the Taino rituals. Played in rectangular courts surrounded by monoliths, aligned with the solar equinoxes. The Arawaks had a lesser version of this game.
5. The handcrafting of stone, wood, bones, and shells, was never developed by the Arawaks, with such majesty as the Tainos did. For example: the Taino’s travelling canoes, 90 feet long, accommodating 150 people, crafted with "unsurpassed beauty", as Fray Bartolome de las Casas described.
6. Another example are the Taino percussion instruments, one of them called the Mayohuacan, sacred tambour. If we compare it with the Aztec’s drum, the Teponzatle, both have the same acoustic design. For both cultures, it meant "the voice of the gods".
7. The majestic ceremonial dance, the Areyto Taino, with it’s choreographies (dances), and choralogephies (chants), had distinctive names which gave these tribal rituals a regional definition, like the "Areyto of the Magua", and the "Areyto Anacaona". The Arawaks never celebrated these rituals with such majestuosity.
8. There was a ceremony celebrated by the Colla tribe, where the single males dressed with the female dress, the nagua. In this ritual, they asked the moon for a wife. The Tainos also celebrated this ritual. It is to be noted that the Spaniards, when seeing an Indian dressed with nagua, thinking that they were homosexuals, released their pack of dogs and killed them.
9. The cohoba ritual, where the Tainos inhaled an hallucinogenic dust from the cohoba tree, was used to communicate with the gods. This ritual was also inherited from the ancient Andean tribes of the Collas. The Arawaks never performed this ritual.
10. The Taino wedding ceremonies, by tying a knot among their wedding clothes, symbolizing the myth of the marriage among the two moons of Venus (as the myth states), was also celebrated by the Andean tribes, not so with the Arawak people.
11. Finally, Juan C. Zamora’s linguistic research: Indigenisms of the Conquistadore's Language, totally discards any Arawak influence in the Taino tribe. In this study, it was found that the Taino language was influenced by:
Words of Origin %
Nahuatl 41
Taino 30
Other 13
Undetermined 4
All these are just a few indications to convince us that the Taino was a direct descendant of the Collas and not the Arawaks (Tribe from the Amazon's Orinoco River).
Special thanks to Eddie Cruz for sharing this information.
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Last updated on November 06, 2005