ABSTRACT
The region involved is the West Indies, especially the Greater Antilles—the islands of Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Cuba—with some attention to some of the Lesser Antilles. The starch-rich stem sometimes weighs several pounds, and is subterranean in all the eight or so closely similar Antillean species. Despite what was a biological and cultural disaster, there is a surprising continuity of Indian cultural traits. The pressed flour was passed through an Indian-made basketry sieve called "hebechet". In the modern West Indies, manioc roots are processed in two ways. One of these is a direct descendant of the Indian and Colonial method; essentially the same techniques are described for Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the French islands. The methods which Taino were using to prepare food from bitter manioc when Europeans first arrived in the sixteenth century can be specified with some certainty, comparative data on modern South American Indian ethnography and terminology among the non-Indian successor populations of the West Indies.
