G�iro

At least some of the instruments used in traditional Puerto Rican music are believed to have originated with the Ta�no people. Most noteworthy is the g�iro, a notched hollowed-out gourd, which was adapted from a pre-Colombian instrument. Others maintain that similar instruments were also used in other parts of Central and South America and brought to Puerto Rico by the Arawak indians.

The g�iro is made by carving the shell of the gourd and carving parallel fluting on its surface. It is played by holding the g�iro in the left hand with the thumb inserted into the back sound hole to keep the instrument in place. The right hand usually holds the scraper and plays the instrument. The scraper is more properly called a "pua". A rhythmic, rasping sound like this sample audio clip, is produced. Playing the g�iro usually requires both long and short sounds, which are made by scraping both up and down in long or short strokes. The g�iro, like the maracas, is usually played by a singer. The instrument's rasping sound adds counterpoint to folk music but is less often used in salsa bands.

Modern g�iros are also made of metal, plasic or even fiberglass. The scaper is typically made with metal tynes attached to s small block of wood but may be made entirely of wood, metal, bamboo, shell, bone, ceramic or plastic. The size of the g�iro can vary widely although it typically ranges from 25 - 35 cm long.

The earliest known reference to the g�iro is in the writings of Fray I�igo Abbad y Lasierra in 1788. He described the g�iro as one of several instruments that were used to accompany dancers. The other instruments would typically include maracas, tambourine and one or more guitars.

The g�iro is known as Calabazo, Guayo, Ralladera, Rascador, and is considered a percussion instrument.

New Notes about Ta�no Music and its Influence on Contemporary Dominican Life

�� The Dominican nation is one of those in which this passion [to enjoy music and dance] has been the strongest, most alive and dominant since the Colonial Era, when you could dance in the churches and in the streets and public plazas, through the present in which dance is a part of everyday life.�
--Emilio Rodr�guez Demorizi.¹

Music played a highly significant role in both the daily and ritual lives of the Ta�no, as we call the indigenous peoples of Hispaniola and the other islands of the Greater Antilles, although there were actually several different groups of indigenous peoples living here when Christopher Columbus arrived and dramatically changed not only their names, but the course of their history. The Ta�no used music to help make mundane work more bearable, to help them remember and recount their history, to celebrate special occasions, and to communicate with their spiritual guides, their cem�es, to gain their help in healing, for protection against destructive natural forces such as hurricanes and earthquakes, to ensure rain when needed, good harvests, hunts, and fishing expeditions, and other necessities of life. In fact, music and song were so important, that one of the most valuable gifts one Ta�no could give another was a song.²

This study examines Ta�no music and its influences on contemporary Dominican life. While Ta�no musical form itself does not appear to have influenced contemporary Dominican music too much because of the vast differences between it and European-based music, there has, indeed, been a strong and continuing cultural influence, which includes musical instruments, an inborn appreciation for music, song, and dance, and the way that music and appreciation of music forms part of the daily routines and every single ritual event in the lives of Dominicans at all social levels. All of these live on as a joyful part of the Ta�no legacy.

Ta�no musical form

We can only make educated guesses about Ta�no musical form because nobody had cassette recorders in the Conquest Era, and the Spanish chroniclers did not leave us many details.³ We know that Amerindian music in general, across the continents, is typically simple and monophonic, meaning it is composed of a single melodic line, which descends in tone. Ta�no songs were also most likely strophic, which means that the lyrics changed from verse to verse, while the melody stayed the same.⁴ The Spanish chroniclers did note, however, that the Ta�no melodies and rhythms varied depending upon the type of song.

There is, generally, no harmony or polyphony in Amerindian music (polyphonic music presents more than one tone at a time), although there often is antiphonal singing between a leader or soloist and a choir, which means that the choir sings the same melodic line as the leader, but alternates with him or her, or the melodic line may be repeated by the choir in different octaves.⁵ This appears to have been the case among the Ta�no, for all of the chroniclers recorded that they had song leaders and choral responses.

Vocables are very important to most Amerindian songs, as they may have been to Ta�no songs. A vocable is a word composed of various sounds that do not necessarily have any particular recognizable meaning. Often they have been passed down from earlier versions of the language, or from other languages entirely, and it is the ritualistic power that they convey which is important, not their meaning, per se.⁶ Amerindian peoples like the Blackfoot and other Plains Indians most often used the consonants h, y, and w, and various vowels to form the vocables in their songs, avoiding n, c, ts and other consonants; the vowels i and e are sung at a slightly higher pitch, while a, o, and u are sung at a lower pitch.⁷ The Ta�no may have had similar preferences. Many of the Europeans who wrote about Amerindian music described it as �gutteral� and �harsh,� in part because of the prevalence of vocables.⁸ Interestingly, the Spanish chroniclers reported that the Ta�no songs were pleasing, not harsh.

Like the music of most Asian cultures, Amerindian music is also typically pentatonic, meaning based on five notes, instead of the typical 8-note base of most European music.⁹ �What [really] makes the Native American scales sound so alien [to European ears] is that the pitches of the five notes are seemingly chosen at random.�¹⁰ The pitch patterns appear to have varied from tribe to tribe, village to village, family to family, even from person to person, so they were no doubt understood by the Amerindians as a means of kinship or geographic identification, just as indigenous peoples used specific designs for ceramics, textiles, and other decorated objects as identifiers of artists, families, and nations from particular regions.

Ta�no songs

Across the Americas in the Pre-Columbian Era, music was the ideal way �to communicate between the inhabitants of the earthly world and those of the celestial spheres.�¹¹ Music to the Ta�no, like to most other Native American peoples, primarily meant song. Ta�no singers were almost always accompanied by musicians playing mayohuacanes (wooden drums) and frequently maracas (rattles), g��ras (scrapers), and flutes or whistles of various kinds; however, even though it would have been rare for a singer to sing without percussion accompaniment, the song was paramount, not the instrumental music.¹²

In Ta�no songs, there was a lead singer, who danced while singing, accompanied by other singers and dancers, who would join the leader in a call-and-response pattern, following both his or her dance steps as well as the song. Note that the call-and-response song style was and still is quite common in the Greater Antilles, Central, and South America.

The central plaza, most often rectangular, where the Ta�no sang and danced, was called the batey. The Ta�nos� big communal song-and-dance celebrations, which took place in the batey, were called are�tos, which also appears to have been their word for �song,� supporting the idea of song as paramount over instrumental music and dance. The Ta�no word for �dance� is ar�guaca, which stems from ar�guacu, roughly translated as �The Sacred People,� and is the base for our modern word �Arawak.�¹³ This demonstrates that dance, too, was not only sacred, but a term of self identification for the people as a whole.

Possible Ta�no depiction of a dancer, found drawn on
a cave wall in the Dominican Republic

Possible Ta�no depiction of an areito, found drawn on
a cave wall in the Dominican Republic

Each yucayeque (town) had a batey, and there were places, like El Corral de los Indios in San Juan de la Maguana, La Aleta in the eastern Dominican Republic, as well as Caguana in central Puerto Rico, among others, that appear to have been gathering sites for huge regional or inter-island celebrations. They had extremely large bateyes, and in the case of Caguana, multiple bateys of various sizes and shapes.

As previously mentioned, song was the way the Ta�no communicated with and celebrated with their cem�es, their spiritual guides or spiritual counterparts. Musical rhythm �introduces a sense of order in things and elevates the forces of human beings against the unforeseen that� defines the behavior of nature.�¹⁴ Songs were sung by Ta�no men, women, and children while working�for singing eased the work load then, as now�and while hunting or fishing, as well as during all kinds of religious ceremonies and rituals, such as:

� the annual celebration to welcome the new harvest of yucca, from which they prepared their main staple food, a crisp round flatbread called casabe

� to aid in the healing of the ill, which was a religious ritual overseen by a behique (closest equivalent is �shaman�)

� by the behique when he was painting symbols on the walls of a sacred cave and calling upon the cem�es for help

� before, during, and after games, especially their sacred ballgame, the batey (note that the ballgame and the central plaza bear the same name, suggesting that the ballgame preceded the are�to, in terms of chronological cultural development)� for funerals of important members of the community

� to welcome new babies to the world, especially if the babies were males born to the cacique�s (chief�s) eldest sister, for they were the cacique�s successors and were considered to be closer relatives than his own children

� to entertain visitors and bind them together with their hosts in a kind of fictive kinship called guatiao, wherein the caciques and their people exchanged names and swore to deal with each other reciprocally as if they were blood relatives

� and before, during, and after various coming-of-age or transition ceremonies, such as marriage.

For the Ta�no, as for other Native peoples across the Americas, music was seldom performed for its own sake alone, but more often as an exchange, for example, to ensure good trade and/or smooth inter-tribal relations, to bring rain, to stop a hurricane from coming, to ensure a happy and fertile marriage, to help an infant grow healthily to adulthood, to gain success in a game of batey or battle, to cure the sick, to ensure safe passage to Coaybay, the spirit world, for a deceased loved one, to ensure a good harvest or a good hunt, etc.

One of the most valuable, most prestigious gifts that one Ta�no could give to another was a song, because it was not just a song--it was a link to the powerful world of the spirits.¹⁵ Caciques of different yucayekes or cacicazgos on the island and within the region exchanged songs to create stronger bonds of fictive kinship and reciprocal responsibility between themselves and among their people. The chronicler Pedro Martyr confirmed the importance of this exchange of songs. For example, he wrote that the cacique Mayobanex would not turn traitor against the cacique Guarionex because Guarionex had taught him and his principal wife �to sing and dance, [which was] a thing not to be held in mediocre consideration."¹⁶

Most Ta�no songs, however, both the melody and the words, came via dreams or when a person was alone in the forest or mountains, and they were taught to that person by a cem�, who would henceforth guide and help the song�s owner. Most Amerindian peoples across the continent consider songs to be divine gifts from the gods, hence the almost universal popularity of dreamcatchers and dream interpreters of different kinds across the indigenous Americas.

Note that, if the Ta�no�s song were given away as a gift, the cem�s divine help was transferred to the new owner. A Ta�no man or woman could also gain the divine help of a cem� by receiving as a gift--or by taking--the physical representations of these spirits, which were sculptures of various sizes made of wood, bone, stone, or shell. The concept helps explain why the Ta�no went to such great pains to hide their cem� sculptures from the Spaniards.

Like the chicken or the egg riddle about which came first, I have often wondered if a cacique originally become the cacique because he had so many cem�es, thus was more powerful than other men (powerful as in �wise� because he had the counsel of his multiple cem�es), or did he have so many cem�es because he was the cacique through inheritance, thus was given many cem�es as gifts.

Ta�no instruments

Ta�no instruments were principally percussion instruments, which is typical of indigenous peoples across the Americas. Of prime importance among their instruments was the mayohuac�n or maguey,¹⁷ a wooden drum, that was played during almost all Ta�no songs. It was made out of the trunk of a tree and could be �as thick as a man.�¹⁸ Most of the mayohuacanes had an oval, an open slit, or an �H� shape carved into the top to allow the sound to come out, although Fray Ram�n Pan�, who many say was the first New World anthropologist, wrote that he had seen mayohuacanes that were shaped like �blacksmiths� tongs� at one end and that the sound of these drums could be heard a league and a half away�around 4 or 5 miles.¹⁹ That may have been a woman�s drum or a special one used for long distance communication, because the indigenous women of today�s Mexico used a kind of drum that was smaller than that used by males and which had �one tongue above and another below� and thus it was much louder than those that have two tongues on the part above and none below.�²⁰ The chronicler Gonzalo Fern�ndez de Oviedo y Vald�s described and drew a mayohuac�n that was suspended on a cord between two poles. Obviously there were different kinds, which may have varied by use as well as by nation, by region, or perhaps through the choice and creativity of the individual musician who crafted the drum.

Modern sketch of a Ta�no drum

The chroniclers are in general agreement that the mayohuac�n drums were played with sticks, although some say two while others say just one. Because they were sacred instruments, whose music accompanied sacred songs, it is pretty safe to assume that mayohuacanes would have been carved and painted with symbols of their owners� cem�es.

Maracas are rattles, most frequently today made out of small hollowed-out gourds (hig�eros) with stick handles attached, but sometimes carved out of wood.²¹ The main difference between original Ta�no maracas and modern ones is that the original ones, at least those used by the behique for religious rituals, appear to have had one large ball of wood inside�in fact, the maraca was carved out of one piece of wood, handle and all, with the ball of wood that produces the clicking sound carved out of the inner core of that one piece of wood, through open slits that allow the sound to come out.²² Today�s maracas have no slits; they are left enclosed, with many small stones or seeds sealed inside the empty gourd before the handle is attached. The maracas used by Ta�no musicians may have been more like the modern ones, and they appear to have used two at a time, like most modern percussionists. The behique used only one maraca, not two, and he played not by shaking it, but by hitting it against his other hand. Based upon archeological finds, all Ta�no maracas appear to have been carved and painted with cem� designs, which was no doubt especially important for the maracas used by the behiques.

Depiction of a maraca by Dominican artist Joel Villalana

G�iros or g�iras, are scrapers, raspers, that the Ta�no made from hollowed-out elongated gourds with parallel ridges carved into their sides. They no doubt used a shell or piece of bone or wood to rhythmically scrape the instrument. Today g�iras are more often made of tin, stainless steel, or even plastic, and musicians use a metal-tined scraper. The original Ta�no word for the instrument appears to have been guajey, according to the Puerto Rican historian Cayetano Toll y Coste.²³ The g�ira�s sound is so popular that it is used today to accompany every kind of Dominican song I can think of, except lullabies.

The Ta�nos used several kinds of flutes and ocarinas or whistles. The Ta�no guam� or cobo, today called a fotuto,²⁴ was a one-note flute or trumpet made from a conch shell, whose sound, like that of the mayohuac�n, carried for long distances. Some may have had clay or bone mouthpieces, like those that have been found in Mexico.²⁵ In addition to musical accompaniment, we know that the Ta�no used their guam� to sound announcements and warnings across the vast mountain valleys, probably in code, with messages like: �The nasty Spaniards are heading your way!� In later centuries, Dominican butchers blew fotutos to announce to the townspeople what kind of meat was fresh that day, using codes of long-long, short-short, long-short-long tones, etc., which suggests how the guam� might originally have been played.

Depiction of a guam� (conch shell) by Dominican artist Joel Villalana

What may have been decorated bone flutes have been found at various Dominican archaeological sites,²⁶ although Fradique Lizardo did not believe that the ones in the Aida Cartagena Portalat�n and Morban Laucer collections were, in fact, flutes.²⁷ The Ta�no may also have used reed flutes, but if they did, none have survived the tropical climate that we know of at this time.

Various kinds of ocarinas or whistles with one, two, or three finger holes have survived the centuries. They are made of stone, bone, sometimes of baked clay, and are carved or molded in the shapes of animals (frequently birds) with fanciful designs by which the owner honored his or her cem�es.

Other rhythmic instruments? We know from what the Spanish chroniclers wrote that Ta�no dancers, both males and females, wore multiple strands of shells�most frequently those called olive shells²⁸--that tinkled like bells as they moved. Modern-day descendants of the Ta�no, like the Dominican musician, composer, and musicologist Irka Mateo, use percussion instruments made of shells, dried seeds, and other natural objects that, shaken or rubbed together, make beautiful music. Such instruments might very well have been used by the Classic Ta�no, too, who were very creative people and made excellent use of their environment.

Finally, a wide variety of objects have been found that served a double purpose. They include jars with handles that have small stones or seeds sealed inside so that they rattle and stamps that are also rattles, so that one could make music while stamping clothing and skin with pleasing designs. A few wooden vomiting spatulas were also found that not only served a double purpose as rattles but also had up to three finger holes near the top, indicating that they served a third use as flutes.²⁹

Ta�no are�tos in detail

Nearly all of the chroniclers went to great lengths to describe the Ta�nos' fondness for are�tos, their song-and-dance celebrations. There were different kinds of are�tos that took place in the batey. There were are�tos to celebrate annual events such as solstices, first plantings and first harvests, and to celebrate special events such as the marriage of a cacique, the birth of an important nita�no (upper-class Ta�no), the coming of age of an important female, a visit from a neighboring cacique, or victory over an enemy. Are�tos were also held for no other purpose than to entertain or appease the people of the cacicazgo (chiefdom) and to bond them more closely to each other and to their cacique. Are�tos were also held to propitiate a particular cem�. Most importantly, perhaps, are�tos served educational purposes and to glorify both the cacique and his cazicazgo, for it was through song and are�tos that the Tainos transmitted their histories and legends.³⁰

The Ta�no had not yet developed writing by 1492, so they kept their history alive in their art and in their songs, both of which are proven mnemonic techniques. Martyr wrote that the Ta�no, �being simple and illiterate men, have preserved the principal stories of their ancestors. Since time immemorial, particularly in the mansions of their kings, they have ordered their behiques or wisemen to instruct their sons in knowledge about everything.� He explains that, �With this teaching, they accomplish two goals: one general, playing [songs] about their origins and development, and the other particular, lauding the illustrious deeds in peace and in war of their fathers, grandfathers, great grandfathers, and other ancestors.� Both types of songs, he writes, �they call areitos, and like among us the guitar players, they sing, accompanied by dances, to the sound of drums.�³¹

�They have amorous areitos,� Martyr continues, �as well as those that tell of war tactics, whose melody is perfectly in accord with each theme.� He also admired their dances, explaining that, �they display much more agility than in our dances, because they spend more time on them than on anything else, and also because they dance nude, so they never trip over an encumbrance.�³²

The areitos performed for religious reasons required rigorous preparations. For example, the participants fasted for eight days before the ceremony, taking only "the juice [or tea] of certain herbs" known as diga. Just before the are�to began, they bathed in rivers and sacred charcos (natural pools), cleansing their bodies with the sacred diga herb.³³ The ritual bathing may have been obeisance to Atabeyra, the mother of Y�cahu, the principle Ta�no god; in one of her multiple guises, Atabeyra was the goddess of fresh water. After bathing, the males who were going to participate in the are�to painted their bodies with the symbols of their cem�es in colors made from vegetable dyes. To complete the purification, they vomited together, using vomiting sticks to purge their bodies of any remaining food remnants, preparing themselves to receive divine guidance. The vomiting sticks, many of which have survived and are exhibited in various museums, were frequently made from the intricately carved rib bones of the manatee, an animal whose rich, fatty flesh was reserved for the cacique and his family--a good indicator of its prestige.

Finally, before the singing and dancing began, the cacique, seated on his dujo (a low 4-legged wooden or stone stool with cem� designs), inhaled cohoba, a sacred hallucinatory powder, and consulted his spiritual guides. When he began to come out of the trance, he revealed the cem�es� prophecies to the people.

From that point, each are�to, depending upon its purpose--and upon whether the prophecy was favorable or not--followed a different sequence of celebration. A focal point of each was always a series of songs and dances in which participants alternated as leaders, while drummers and other musicians accompanied the singers and dancers from the batey�s sidelines.

Martyr and others described the pleasant, rhythmic tinkling of strings of snail shells which "both sexes [of dancers] wore on their arms, calves, thighs, and heels," which accentuated the beat of the mayohuacanes. Martyr wrote that, "Loaded with these shells they struck the ground with their feet, leaping, singing, and dancing, and they saluted the cacique who, seated in the doorway [of his caney], received those who came, beating on his drum with a stick."³⁴

As many as 300-400 dancers participated in the are�to, weaving around the batey while holding hands or with their arms around each others shoulders. The men wore designs painted in red, black, and white on their bodies, but Marty insists that the women did not: �The women, on the other hand, came without any special haircuts or paint, the virgins totally nude��.³⁵ He notes, however, that the women did wear garlands of multi-colored flowers in their hair.³⁶

Martyr described in detail the annual areito with which the Ta�no celebrated the first casabe made from a harvest of newly planted yucca, details which were told to him by Santiago Ca�izares, who had witnessed one. While the cacique was partaking of cohoba and seeking counsel from his cem�es, the women musicians, who were seated elsewhere, offered casabe to the people. �At a signal from the bovitos [behiques],� writes Martyr:

the garlanded women, �dancing and singing their hymns, which they call areitos, offered cassabe in laboriously woven baskets. Upon entering [the batey] they began to circle those who were seated there; these, rising with sudden leaps, celebrated with admirable areitos of praise, together with them, to the cem�, narrating and singing with the illustrious gestures of their ancestors, giving thanks to the deity for their well being, humbly asking him for future felicity; both sexes on their knees at the end, they offered the deity cassabe, which the bovitos blessed and then they divided the cassabe into pieces as personal presents. Each person carried part of the cassabe to his or her home and kept it there all year as something sacred.³⁷

Final notes

The Ta�nos celebrated all that was good, beautiful and positive in the world with the songs and dances of their are�tos. Songs, music, and dance were a way to thank the cem�es for helping them to live happy and healthy on earth. The Spanish chroniclers, who wrote most of what we know about the life and culture of the Ta�no people in the late 15^th and early 16^th centuries, were astonished by the vibrancy of Ta�no song and dance, by the pulsing rhythms of their percussion instruments, and by the fact that Ta�no men, women, and children of all ages and all social levels sang and danced together.

I believe that one of the most enjoyable of the many cultural legacies from the pre-Columbian Era is Dominicans� deep appreciation for music, song, and dance. Just like their Ta�no ancestors, Dominicans today will happily participate in a fiesta with lots and lots of music to celebrate all kind of holidays and special events. And dance! My five-year-old Dominican grandson, Brighton, has danced since before he could walk, and one day when he was four, his mother called me to come see�she had the radio playing in the bedroom, and he was wriggling his hips to the music even though he was sound asleep!

Across the country, music blares from radios that are part of the standard equipment of every colmado--the mom-and-pop neighborhood stores that are the gathering spots for young and old alike in the Dominican Republic�s urban barrios and rural pueblos--and from the radios of almost every street vendor as well as all the established stores, and, of course, from speakers in vehicles of all kinds, some of which are so large they fill the trunks or backs of the cars and vans, and are so loud that they set off car alarms as they travel down the city side streets. And then there are the discos in all the cities and towns, and even small pueblos in the countryside, where Dominicans spend many happy hours dancing �til dawn.

Joyful noise!..Joyful movement! This music is a living legacy from Caribbean peoples� indigenous ancestors, who were enjoying music, song, and dance as many as 6,000 to 8,000 years ago, since their arrival in canoes from Central and South America. Let the fiestas continue!

Notes

REFERENCES

Cartagena Portalat�n, Aida. Danza, m�sica e instrumentos de los indios de la Espa�ola. Santo Domingo: Taler Gr�fico de la UASD, 1974.

Casas, Bartolom� de las. Apolog�tica Historia Sumaria, Vols. 6-8 of Obras Completas, comp. Paulino Casta�eda, Carlos de Rueda, and Carmen God�nez e Inmaculada de la Corte. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1995.

Col�n, Ferdinand. The Life of the Admiral, by his son Ferdinand, trans. Benjamin Keen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959.

Dictionary of the Spoken Ta�no Language. http://www.taino-tribe.org/tedict.html.

Dictionary--Taino Indigenous Peoples Of The Caribbean, based on the Cl�sicos de Puerto Rico encyclopedia by Dr. Cayetano Coll y Toste, http://www.taino-tribe.org/terms1.htm

Fields, Gary S. �American Indian Music Traditions and Contributions.� www:\Documents and Settings\Guitar\Desktop\Taino music\Taino Music Notes2\American Indian Music.htm. Version 1995 07-14.

Lizardo, Fradique. Instumentos musicales folkl�ricos dominicanos. Santo Domingo: Editorial Santo Domingo, 1988.Mart�, Samuel. Music Before Columbus. Mexico: Ediciones Euroamericas Klaus, 1978.

Martyr D'Anghiera [de Angleria], Peter [Pedro]. Pedro M�rtir de Angleria, primer cronista de Indias: D�cadas del nuevo mundo. Santo Domingo: Sociedad Dominicana de Bibliofilos, 1989.

Mart�nez Miura, Enrique. La m�sica precolombina; un debate cultural despu�s de 1492. Barcelona: Ediciones Paid�s Ib�rica, 2004.Music of Amerindians (a course at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee), http://www.uwm.edu/Course/660-310/02AmIndianMusic/tsld005.htm.

�Native Americans & American Popular Music� in Parlor Music: Popular Sheet Music from the 1800s to the 1920s, http://parlorsongs.com/insearch/amerindian/amerindian0.asp.

Oviedo y Vald�s, Gonzalo Fern�ndez de. Historia general y natural de las Indias, 5 vols. Biblioteca de Autores Espa�oles, vols. 117-121. Madrid: Gr�ficas Orbe, 1959 (originally 1535).

Rodr�guez Demorizi, Emilio. M�sica y baile en Santo Domingo. Santo Domingo: Librer�a Hispaniola, 1971.�Vocable,� in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocables.

Wilson, Samuel M. Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990.

About the author:
Dr. Lynne Guitar is a co-editor of CAC and Kacike, The Journal of Caribbean Amerindian History and Anthropology; Resident Director of CIEE's program in "Spanish Language & Caribbean Studies" at the Pontificia Universidad Cat�lica Madre y Maestra (PUCMM), Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic; and a member of the Counsejo de Ancianoso/a of the new Dominican organization called Guabancex, Viento y Agua, dedicated to promoting knowledge about the Ta�no people, their culture, and their importance through the present day. This article is the complete version, with notes and references, of an oral summary presented for the Dominican Congress on Archaeology and Anthropology �Dr. Fernando Luna Calder�n,� on October 11, 2006. It will also be published in Spanish in an upcoming issue of the Bolet�n del Hombre Dominicano