Stories from the Caribbean track progress across the region’s diverse island nations and coastal communities. Coverage includes advances in climate resilience, marine conservation, public health, and economic development — reported with context and care.
Jamaica’s earliest known inhabitants, the Redware people, arrived around 600 C.E. after crossing the Caribbean from South America through a long chain of islands. Archaeologists have traced them through the red pottery they left at coastal sites like Alligator Pond, where they fished and hunted turtles. Their arrival opens Jamaica’s human story nearly 900 years before Columbus.
Around 600 C.E., Taíno seafarers known as the Lucayans paddled dugout canoes across open Caribbean water and landed on the uninhabited islands we now call the Bahamas. Over the next eight centuries, they spread across the archipelago, growing to roughly 40,000 people by 1492. Their quiet arrival remains one of the Caribbean’s great feats of navigation.
The Saladoid people set out from Venezuela’s Orinoco lowlands roughly 2,500 years ago, sailing island to island across the Lesser Antilles and reaching as far as Hispaniola. They carried crops, communal longhouses, and vividly painted red pottery. Their seafaring laid cultural groundwork that shaped the Caribbean for more than a thousand years.
The Taíno built a thriving island civilization across the Caribbean long before Columbus arrived in 1492, descended from seafarers who reached the islands from South America roughly 2,500 years ago. Their matrilineal chiefdoms sustained large populations for some 1,500 years, and their words — hurricane, hammock, canoe — still travel the world today.
The Lucayan people spent roughly 800 years paddling dugout canoes from island to island, settling a 1,400-kilometer chain of Bahamian islands that had never before been inhabited. By around 1500, close to 40,000 people lived across the archipelago’s 19 largest islands — a quiet testament to generations of seamanship, patience, and accumulated knowledge of the sea.
