Houses
Lucayans, like other Tainos, lived in multi-household houses. Descriptions of Lucayan houses by the Spanish match those of houses used by Tainos in Hispaniola and Cuba: shaped like a round tent, tall, made of poles and thatch, with an opening at the top to let smoke out. Columbus described the houses of the Lucayans as clean and well-swept. The houses were furnished with cotton nets (some kind of hammocks) for beds and furnishings, and were used mainly for sleeping. Each house sheltered an extended family. There are no surviving reports of the size of Lucayan houses, but estimates of about 20 people per house in Taino communities in pre-contact Cuba are cited by Keegan as a reasonable estimate for Lucayan houses. While not mentioned for Lucayan houses, the houses in Cuba were described as having two doors. Classic Taino villages in Hispaniola and eastern Cuba typically had houses arranged around a central plaza, and often located along rivers with access to good agricultural land. On the other hand, Lucayan villages were linear, along the coast, often on the leeward side of an island, but also found on the windward side wherever tidal creeks provided some protected shoreline.
Read more about this topic: Lucayan People
Famous quotes containing the word houses:
“Do you see how the god always hurls his bolts at the greatest houses and the tallest trees. For he is wont to thwart whatever is greater than the rest.”
—Herodotus (c. 484–424 B.C.)
“When you have eaten your fill and have built fine houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks have multiplied, and your silver and gold is multiplied, and all that you have is multiplied, then do not exalt yourself, forgetting the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery...”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 8:12-14.
“And the Harvard students in the brick
hallowed houses studied Sappho in cement rooms.
And this Sappho danced on the grass
and danced and danced and danced.
It was a death dance.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)