Archaeologists have traced the cultural origins of the Taino back to the lower Orinoco.

They arrived in the Caribbean through the Venezuela-Trinidad gateway in about 300 BC.
After that several waves of the Taino groups entered the Caribbean. They were expert seafarers,
and quickly navigated their way up the island chain until they reached the Greater Antilles where
they formed the largest communities in about 250 AD. The politics, religion, economics, society
and decline of the Tainos are some of the major tings that will be discussed in this essay.
They did not have what is called a government run society in those days. Instead they had
two classes; the middle class and the upper class. Chief-Dom was considered to be upper
class. Cacique was the name of the Chief- doms and it was a hereditary position handed
down from father to son. The eldest son would inherit the position. If the Cacique did not
have a son, then the eldest son of his sister would inherit the position. Only if she did not
have a son would a cacique be chosen.
Their religion was considered to be animalistic in that everything, including inanimate
objects would be considered as having a soul. They were very connected with their
environment and did not mistreat it in any way. They went so far as to apologise to the trees is
they had to cut it down. They also have little symbols or embodiment of their beliefs called
Zemi. They did not worship these objects as idols but instead believed that they caused of
good luck or bad luck.
They were a highly developed agricultural people. They would fish and hunt for food
and they planted yam, cassava, pimento, tomatoes pineapple potato and other foods. They
also ate turtle; something the Kalinos did not do. Their industrial technology in textiles and
ceramics was of the same standard as that of the rural communities of Asia and Europe. They did
not how money or coins, instead it used bartering as their economic exchange.
Festivals were celebrated by using tobacco. It was crushed, grind or grounded and
sniffed like cocane. The leader would be the only one to do this and he would then sneeze a lot.
This they believed was him being possessed by a spirit. Men would sleep in communal house
called a Carbet/Bohio. When a boy reached the age of 13 he was sent to sleep in that house as
well.
They didnt have the type of education that is readily available today. Instead they had
education that in their time would have been considered necessary for living. From an early age
the women carried both boys and girls to the gardens and taught them what they need to no.
When the boys turned 13, not only were they sent to the Communal house but they went with
the men and trained in the art of war. While the girls would have known more about
agriculture, they men would have known how to hunt and fish.
The Tainos were mistreated/ill-treated. They were worked to death seeing as they were
not accustom to the type of work given to them by the Europeans. The Tinos did not believe in
what is called today as heaven and hell, and this made suicide very common. Entire villages
would walk off a cliff and this greatly increased their mortality rate. The Europeans used them
as a form of target practice so they were also killed for sport.

The Middle Passage was the stage of the triangular trade in which millions of people
from Africa were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. Ships
departed Europe for African markets with manufactured goods, which were traded for purchased
or kidnapped Africans, who were transported across the Atlantic as slaves; the slaves were then
sold or traded for raw materials, which would be transported back to Europe to complete the
voyage. Voyages on the Middle Passage were a large financial undertaking, and they were
generally organized by companies or groups of investors rather than individuals.
Traders from the Americas and Caribbean received the enslaved Africans. European
powers such as Portugal, England, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and
Brandenburg, as well as traders from Brazil and North America, took part in this trade.
The enslaved Africans came mostly from eight regions: Senegambia, Upper Guinea,
Windward Coast, Gold Coast, Bight of Benin, Bight of Biafra, West Central Africa and
Southeastern Africa.
Africans were often treated like cattle during the crossing. On the slave ships, people
were stuffed between decks in spaces too low for standing. The heat was often unbearable,
and the air nearly unbreathable. Women were often used sexually. Men were often chained
in pairs, shackled wrist to wrist or ankle to ankle. People were crowded together, usually
forced to lie on their backs with their heads between the legs of others. This meant they
often had to lie in each other's feces, urine, and, in the case of dysentery, even blood. In
such cramped quarters, diseases such as smallpox and yellow fever spread like wildfire.
The diseased were sometimes thrown overboard to prevent wholesale epidemics. Because a
small crew had to control so many, cruel measures such as iron muzzles and whippings
were used to control slaves. Over the centuries, between one and two million persons died in
the crossing. This meant that the living were often chained to the dead until ship surgeons had
the corpses thrown overboard.
The Zong, a British slaver, took too many slaves on a voyage to the New World in 1781.
Overcrowding combined with malnutrition and disease killed several crew members and around
60 slaves. Bad weather made the Zong's voyage slow; the captain decided to drown his slaves at
sea, so the owners could collect insurance on the slaves. Over 100 slaves were killed and a
number of slaves chose to kill themselves. The Zong incident became fuel for
the abolitionist movement and a major court case, as the insurance company refused to
compensate for the loss.
The two most common types of resistance were refusal to eat and suicide. Suicide was a
frequent occurrence, often by refusal of food or medicine or jumping overboard, as well as by a
variety of other opportunistic means. Both suicide and self-starving were prevented as much as
possible by slaver crews; slaves were often force-fed or tortured until they ate, though some still
managed to starve themselves to death; slaves were kept away from means of suicide, and the
sides of the deck were often netted. Slaves were still successful, especially at jumping overboard.
Often when an uprising failed, the mutineers would jump en masse into the sea. Slaves generally
believed that if they jumped overboard, they would be returned to their family and friends in
their village, or to their ancestors, in the afterlife