Introduction

Indigenous peoples have a history of resilience and perseverance, having faced significant challenges that have threatened their existence, culture, and territories. Contemporary society has a responsibility to support their rights and revalue their indispensable contribution to cultural diversity and environmental conservation.

The indigenous people of the Americas presents a summary of various aspects of Taino culture in Puerto Rico, and of twenty-two American ethnic groups represented by the hyperrealistic sculptures of the Swedish-Peruvian artist Felipe Lettersten.

Settlement

Humans have a long history of occupation in the Americas. Archaeological evidence and genomic data suggest that the first waves of migration projected from Northeast Asia to North America around 25,000 years ago. Human presence at such early times has been recorded not only in North America but also in South America, as recently documented in Brazil by the presence of body ornaments made from sloth bones dating back at least 24,000 years before present. These population movements were made possible, in large part, by the use of navigation, which allowed them to travel, in relatively short periods of time, over great distances. It was the eventual adaptation of these groups to the different types of environments in the Americas that fostered the development of the great cultural and social diversity that existed for millennia in the Indigenous world.

Some of these groups, adapted to coastal life, developed navigation techniques that facilitated their travel by sea to distant regions. The first sustained long-distance voyages in the Americas resulted in the discovery of the Antilles. The oldest dates in the insular Caribbean have been documented on the island of Trinidad, dating back to 8,200 BC. In the Greater Antilles, recent studies indicate that the island with the oldest evidence of human presence to the present is Puerto Rico, with dates extending back 6,200 years. These early groups not only took advantage of the resources available on the islands—such as sloths and the giant hutia—but also introduced agriculture and ceramic production, thus laying the foundation for the migratory processes and sociocultural developments that occurred over time in Puerto Rico and the rest of the Antillean Caribbean.

Dr. Reniel Rodríguez