They did not leave behind great monuments. No towering pyramids, no carved stone faces watching the horizon. Their names, the ones they called themselves, are lost to time, swallowed by the tide. And so, history—European history, the kind that writes over rather than remembers—calls them Casimiroids, a name taken not from their own tongues but from a place, Casimira, in what is now the Dominican Republic.
But they were here long before the maps, before the records. They moved through the Caribbean when the land was still young, between 4000 and 400 B.C., making their way from Belize, in the Yucatán Peninsula, stretching across waters, settling in Cuba, in Hispaniola, moving with the instinct of people who have always known that the sea is not a boundary, but a road.
They worked with what they had, shaping the world with their hands. They flaked tools, striking stone against stone, making edges sharp enough to cut, to shape, to build. They crafted conical pestles, grinding food, breaking down what nature provided into something more. Disks, dagger-like objects—these were the artifacts they left behind, fragments of a people history tried to forget but whose hands still speak through the things they made.
For a long time, that was the story. They were toolmakers, nothing more. That was how the archaeologists labeled them, how they were categorized. But then the earth gave up another truth. The Casimiroids were also potters, shaping clay, hardening it with fire—proving that they were not just passing through, not just scraping by. They were horticulturalists, growing food, tending the land, planting what they knew would sustain them.
And so, the narrative shifts. The Casimiroids were not relics, not a footnote before the real history began. They were a people who lived, who thrived, who built something lasting, even if time has only left us with shards and fragments. They were part of the long, winding human story of the Caribbean—a story that did not begin with conquest, but with creation.
