Lucayan Heritage

The Lucayans were the people living across the Bahamas when Columbus arrived, an Arawakan-speaking population related to the Taíno of the Greater Antilles, numbering perhaps forty thousand across the archipelago. Within about twenty-five years they were gone, taken to Hispaniola and elsewhere as forced labour and destroyed by disease. What they left is archaeological: duho seats and wooden objects preserved in blue holes, ceramics, shell tools, and the remains found in caves at Lucayan National Park on Grand Bahama, where skeletal material was recovered in the 1980s. Words survived into English through Spanish, including canoe, hammock and hurricane.

What you'll find

• Lucayan National Park caves - where remains and artefacts were recovered.
• Blue hole finds - wooden objects preserved in anoxic water.
• Museum collections - ceramics, shell tools and duhos in Nassau.
• The vocabulary - Lucayan words that entered English through Spanish.

When to go

Year-round for museums. Cave sites on Grand Bahama are open through the day within the national park. Archaeological work continues and new blue hole finds are reported periodically.

Practical notes

There is not a great deal to see: no standing structures survive and the material is scattered across small museum displays. Interpretation across the islands is thin and in places absent. Blue hole archaeology is not accessible to visitors. Anyone expecting a Taíno-scale heritage experience of the kind found in Hispaniola will be disappointed.

Nearby

Lucayan National Park is on Grand Bahama; the Nassau museums hold the collections.