The Carib were a Native American people who originally lived in the northern part of South America. Many of them migrated to the Lesser Antilles, a group of small islands in the West Indies. The Caribbean Sea is named after the Carib.

Society and culture

The Carib lived in small villages. Their simple houses were made of pole frames covered with palm thatch. The Carib grew cassava and other crops but obtained much of their food by hunting with blowguns and bows and arrows.

Each Carib village was ruled by a village leader. The leader settled disputes and led raiding parties against other Indians. The Carib were expert navigators who sent warriors over the sea in large canoes. They were also fierce fighters. After torturing and killing the enemy men, they took the women into their own tribe as wives or slaves. The Carib were known and feared for sometimes eating the bodies of their enemies. This practice, called cannibalism, may have been part of the tribe's religion.

History

The Carib probably lived first in the Amazon River valley of South America. Hundreds of years before Europeans arrived, however, the Carib migrated to the continent's northern coast. After AD 1000 many of them moved again, this time to the Caribbean islands of the Lesser Antilles. The Carib drove off the Arawak people who were already living on the islands.

After 1492 the Spanish conquerors of the Americas tended to avoid the islands where the Carib lived. There was no gold on them, and the Island Carib were too difficult to defeat in battle. Not until after the mid-1600s were most of their islands taken over by other Europeans. Few of the Carib survived, except on the islands of Saint Vincent and Dominica, where some still live today.

The Carib groups of the South American mainland lived in the Guianas and south to the Amazon River. Less warlike than the Island Carib, they were wiped out through fighting and disease after the Spanish arrived. Today many South American Indians speak languages related to that of the original Carib.

An important offshoot of the Carib are the Garifuna, or the Black Carib. The Garifuna originated when escaped and shipwrecked slaves from Africa mixed with Carib people on Saint Vincent. After the British took control of the island in the 1790s, they forced many of the Garifuna onto the Central American mainland. Some of their descendants live in Belize, Honduras, and Nicaragua today.