Peoples of South America and the Caribbean

By 300 BC most people in South America had become farmers, although some hunter-gathering persisted in the southern part of the continent where farming was dificult. By 750 BC, complex societies were developing in the Andes. As in Mesoamerica, they went through phases of growth and decline, but in the central Andes there was a degree of cultural unity in that artistic differences between the highlands and lowlands were not as marked.

South America
The coast of the central Andes is best known archaeologically, for the graphic pottery of the Moche, dating from AD 100 to 600. It reveals much about daily life and religion. The Moche were the first to assert themselves more widely by conquest. Both pottery and tombs show that, like their contmeporaries in Mesoamerica, Moche kings exhibited their authority in elaborate rites.

Yet from about AD 600 the coast succumbed to conquest from the Tiahuanaco and the Huari. Both these civilizations developed elements of the earlier Chavin cult. The city of Tiahuanaco was centred on the Titicata basin where the people grew potatoes and herded the llamas and alpacas. Renowned for their stone buildings and sculpture, their expansion seems to have been achieved through the establishment of religious and commercial colonies. The reasons for its collapse in about AD 1200 are not fully understood, but may have been related to climate change that affected agricultural production. The Huari are often considered to have been the precursors of the Inca. Among the hallmarks of Huari civilization was a network of roads and logitical, perhaps administrative, bases,. Following two centuries of fragmentation, the Moche tradition was revived among the Chimu, consummate engineers who developed vast irrigation systems. They controlled parts of the Andean coast until their destruction by the Incas.

In the northern Andes and southern Central America, along the Amazon and in the plains southwest of the Amazon, there were other large populations. Much of the most telling evidence for them is the form of extensive field systems. In northwestern South America chiefdoms had emerged, and in the southernmost parts of Central America superb sculpture, goldwork and pottery indicate powerful patrons.

The Caribbean
There is some evidence that peoples exploiting wild food resources occupied Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic about 4000 BC. However, it was between 500 and 250 BC that farmers began migrating to the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico from the Orinoco and other rivers in south America. They introduced the cultivation of manioc (cassava)  and brought with them dogs and a distinctive red and white pottery known as Saladoid. Between AD 500 and AD 1000, the population in these islands expanded and spread to parts of the islands of Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Cuba and Jamaica. Most of these peoples were probably Arawak speakers. With population growth the societies became more complex and chiefdoms emerged. There people were later known as Tainos.