Long Post, so you may not want to read the whole thing. I was fascinated by the story of these people, so I did a little research and this is the result. (Source: Mostly Wikipedia)
They called themselves Lukku-cairi, which means “people of the islands.” Spanish invaders transliterated this to Lucayos, and English speakers changed it again to “Lucayans.”
Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican friar and contemporary of Christopher Columbus, described these original Bahamians as “the most blessed among all Indians in gentleness, simplicity, humility and other natural virtues.” They were, by all accounts, an attractive people. Columbus reported that the first men and women he met in the New World were “well-proportioned and good looking.” It did not escape his attention that most of them, men and unwed women, went about “naked as their mother bore them.”
In his report to Queen Isabella, Columbus added: “They are very gentle and without knowledge of what is evil; nor do they murder or steal… . Your Highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better people … they have the sweetest talk in the world, and are always laughing.” Peter Martyr d’Anghera of Florence wrote in 1511 that Lucayan women were “so beautiful that numerous inhabitants of the neighboring countries, charmed by their beauty, abandon their homes and, for the love of them, settle in their country.”
The natives had coarse, dark hair, which some wore long “like the tail of a horse.” In others, it was cut short “and brought forward over the eyebrows.” Columbus added that “their skin is similar in color to the people of the Canaries–neither black nor white.” Although they knew how to defend themselves–the men showed their battle scars to the newcomers–they generally lived in peace and traded with neighboring tribes in Cuba and Hispaniola.
The Lucayans were a “religiously and socially sophisticated people,” wrote Dr Julian Granberry, PhD–an expert on ancient languages–in the Bahamas Handbook for 1999. “Their customs–although related to the lands of their origin–were distinctly Bahamian. They indicate local customs developed in The Bahamas rather than being replicated from their Taino cousins or other peoples further south in the Caribbean.”
Thanks to recent archaeological work, the date of the first arrival has been continually pushed back until it is now estimated to be about 300 or 400 AD–and perhaps even earlier. There are thought to have been at least two migrations of Arawak-speaking people into The Bahamas: one from Cuba, the other from Hispaniola. Their fusion gave rise to the Lucayan people.” Equally surprising are hints – based on chemical studies of pottery shards –that the Lucayans, like Columbus, may have also been latecomers to paradise. A primitive fisher-folk known as the Siboney (a word meaning “cave dweller”) preceded them, and the Lucayans either displaced or absorbed them.
An estimated 20,000 to 40,000 Lucayans inhabited the Bahamas archipelago when the Pinta, the Niña and the Santa Maria dropped anchor off Guanahani–the Lucayan name for the island that Columbus rechristened San Salvador. Compared to other native villages throughout the Caribbean, the Lucayan communities were small. By all accounts, they were clean and well-kept, arranged along coastlines, often behind dunes, with a central swept-dirt plaza where ceremonies and games took place. One of these was called batos, a ball game that has been described as a cross between football and volleyball.
Several families–up to 20 individuals–lived together in large circular dwellings. They were made of upright wooden poles and palm thatch, topped by a conical palm leaf roof with a hole at the top that allowed smoke to escape. Their hereditary leaders, caciques, could be of either sex. They owned carved wooden ceremonial stools or thrones known as duhos, examples of which have been found in caves on several of the islands.
Below are what experts think their dwellings looked like. Pretty sophisticated really for the time period.
The Lucayans had a varied diet that included cassava, sweet potatoes, arrowroot, peanuts and beans, all of which they probably brought with them and cultivated. They may also have grown papayas and pineapples, and enjoyed wild fruit such as guava, mammee apple, guineps, scarlet plums and tamarinds.
They also caught and ate land crabs, iguanas, hutias (a rabbit-sized rodent) and barkless yellow dogs, now extinct, that they kept. From the sea, they ate fish caught in nets made of cotton or on hooks made of bone or shell. They also depended on conch, the easy-to-capture mollusk that is a favorite food among Bahamians today.
Stone chopping, cutting and scraping tools were imported from Cuba or Haiti. Most pottery was of a type called palmetto ware, tempered with bits of conch shell. While palmetto ware has been described as plain and utilitarian, it was also “technically complex [with] a broad range of variability along numerous dimensions,” according to William F Keegan, assistant curator at Florida State Museum.
“We know sites were clustered in groups, indicating a close political relationship between them,” wrote Granberry. “… [I]t is probable the islands were politically divided into rulerships, perhaps akin to provinces.”
As for their religion, Craton and Saunders write that the Lucayans were “classic animists.” They believed that all living things–and also the dead and even the yet-unborn–had spirts, as did the sun, moon and stars, the sea and natural phenomena such as hurricanes. “Many Lucayan ceremonies were basically religious and included dancing to the limits of exhaustion under the narcotic effect of drugs and rhythmic music.” The Lucayans used yopo, a potent narcotic, which was ground into a powder and snorted..”
The Taino/Arawak forebears of the Lucayans were one of many tribes who peopled the steamy Orinoco River basin–on the border between Brazil and Venezuela–in prehistoric times. Leaving the muddy waters of the Orinoco, the ancestors of the Lucayans would have reached Grenada and then island-hopped, as today’s yachters do, following the great arc of islands that curves northeast, north and then west to Puerto Rico. Many tribes settled on islands along the way, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, Antigua, Barbuda and the Virgin Islands. For the Lucayans-to-be, it was a longer paddle to Hispaniola and even further from there to the Turks and Caicos and Great Inagua, the southernmost island of The Bahamas. Why did they leave the Orinoco basin? The usual answer is that they were fleeing from the warlike Caribs, another tribe that lived along the banks of the Orinoco. But it’s also possible that the movement of native peoples into the Caribbean was simply a continuation of the restlessness that drove early man to explore the unknown territories in front of him.