Contact and Colonial Impact in Jamaica: Comparative Material Culture and Diet at Sevilla la Nueva and the Taíno Village of Maima

For the many indigenous cultures encountered in the Americas by the Renaissance voyages of discovery, and particularly those on the islands of the Caribbean, the arrival of Europeans on their shores led to rapid demographic and cultural decline. Introduction of European diseases, violent confrontations, enslavement, Crown-sanctioned forced labor, and the destruction of traditional cultural patterns resulted from this devastating contact and colonialism. But to simplify these initial encounters into narratives of conquest and devastation is to ignore the profound social change to both the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and settler European groups that this encounter provoked (Deagan 2004, 597;