Igneri

The Igneri were Arawakan-speaking farmers and potters who occupied the southern Lesser Antilles before the rise of the Island Caribs. Their ancestors were an Arawak culture on the middle Orinoco around 1500 BC, later crossing by canoe to the islands and reaching Dominica by about AD 400.

They brought horticulture and ceramics, and grew cassava for casabe bread on slash-and-burn fields, plus fishing, hunting and shellfish gathering; their ceremonial centre at Tibes on Puerto Rico preserves their ball courts. Archaeologists link them to the Suazoid culture of about 1000 to 1450.

Legend remembered the Igneri as peaceful islanders whom the warlike Kalinago conquered and replaced, but linguistics and archaeology suggest otherwise: the Kalinago in fact spoke the Igneri Arawakan tongue, suggesting the islanders were absorbed through intermarriage and a change of identity rather than destroyed, their language living on as Island Carib.