Xaymaca - Land of Wood and Water

Before the plantations. Before the slave ships. Before the British flag flew over Kingston Harbour. There was Xaymaca -’Land of Wood and Water’ - and the Taíno people who had called it home for over a thousand years.This is where the story of Jamaica truly begins. Volume 1 of A Multi-Volume History of Jamaica takes the reader back tothe island’s indigenous roots: the Taíno civilisation that built villages across the island’s mountain valleys and coastalplains, developed sophisticated agricultural systems, crafted the dugout canoes that carried them across the CaribbeanSea, and gave the world the hammock, the barbecue, and the word ’hurricane.’Drawing on archaeological evidence, Spanish colonial records, and the oral traditions that have survived across thecenturies, this volume reconstructs what Jamaica looked like before 1494 - when Christopher Columbus, on his secondvoyage to the Americas, became the first European to set eyes on the island and anchor in the bay the Taíno called’Xaymaca.’ The encounter that followed would change both worlds forever.Written in an accessible blend of narrative history and Jamaican cultural perspective, Xaymaca does not treat the arrivalof Columbus as a ’discovery.’ It treats it as a collision - between two worlds, two worldviews, and two visions of whatthe land was for. The Taíno numbered in the tens of thousands. Within fifty years of Spanish arrival, they were virtuallygone. This book insists that their story is told before the story of everyone who came after.The history of Jamaica does not begin with slavery. It begins here, in the deep green mountains and warm coral bays ofXaymaca - with the people who named the place and loved it first.