ABSTRACT
In this section the primary objective is to delineate the ethnohistorical processes involved in the formation of Dominican culture. Contrary to what many investigators, analysts, and historians would have us believe, the process was quite simple. True enough, the arrival of Cristóbal Colón constituted a very major turning point in the ethnicity of the whole Caribbean region. But equally true is the fact that well prior to the year 1492, there were groups of indigenous peoples living in the region, trying to cope with their environment as skillfully as they knew how. These were people with a history, a culture, a reality—people who had been living for centuries in the Antilles when Columbus first encountered this other reality. Wheels, for instance, existed in the Americas long before Europeans did; ancient American cultures used wheels on children’s toys. What arrived after the Great Encounter of 1492 was the notion of utilizing those wheels for purposes of work. The obsidian blades used by Aztec surgeons, in another instance, rivaled even modern steel for precise incision.
