Maguana

Maguana was a Taíno chiefdom in the interior of Hispaniola, remembered in accounts of the Spanish conquest as the domain of Caonabo. Its communities formed part of the island's wider Indigenous world, linked by paths, waterways and relationships among settlements. Cultivation, fishing and gathering sustained households, while chiefs exercised authority through networks of social and ceremonial obligations.

Spanish conquest in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries brought violent demands for gold, labour and obedience. Caonabo resisted the colonists as they sought control of Hispaniola. Disease, warfare, forced labour and displacement devastated Indigenous communities; colonial settlements and estates reshaped land use and imposed unequal systems of power on survivors.