The first peoples were migrants, arriving to face an infinitely different environment from present day
According to Guyanese anthropologist Denis Williams, the Americas began to be populated around 12,000 years ago when global decline in sea levels led to exposed land below seas that allowed the crossing of early man through the Bering Strait from East Asia into North America, and gradual southern migration.
These migrants, known as paleo-Indians (old Indians), are also described as big game hunters since they are known to have hunted the large game of the late Ice Age era. Using flaked stone tools to hunt, it is the discovery of their tools and implements throughout the Americas, as far as at the edge of Argentina, that records their southward migrations.
Williams noted that the first peoples entered northwestern Guyana about 11,000 years ago when Trinidad was yet part of the South American mainland, and grassy savannahs extended far out into the Atlantic Ocean we know of today.
The coastlands of an ancient era were markedly different from the present day Guyana coastline. Evidence from the deep mud below today’s coastline suggest stands of mangrove forests existed some 8,000 years ago, and as proof of continual rising of coastline and sea, mangrove forests are indicated some 7,000 years ago, until the sea reached its present level some 6,000 years ago.
As continuous land penetration and coastal erosion occurred over the millennia, old beaches were isolated that comprised either shell or sand. These reefs, Williams noted, have provided the foundations for the earliest railways of the 19th century, and have been of significant cultural importance.
According to Williams, while the clays of the Coastal Plain were being deposited to the east of the Essequibo River by a rising sea, the land west of the Essequibo River was subject to continual subsidence resulting from movement of the earth’s crust. As the land surface subsided, the water table rose. As clay sediments were deposited, they were gradually covered by varying thickness of pegasse accumulating under the water table, forming the vast 3,500 square kilometres pegasse swamps of the North West.
It is in this period, beginning some 7,000 years ago – regarded as the Archaic period – that the meso-Indians (middle Indians) or hunter gatherers because of their subsistence on hunting, fishing and gathering or collecting wild plant foods, thrived.
However, unlike North West and Pomeroon hunter-gatherers, those of the Guyana interior were nomadic, constantly moving their sites from place to place. In fact, there is some variance in settlement patterns in the contrasting environments. While Rupununi and North West hunter-gatherers’ degrees of permanency varied, settlements along the Oronoque and New rivers in the rainforest areas were more fixed.
In the Pegasse swamps of the North West, food resources included fish and crustaceans, beetle larvae and wild plant sources such as wild cashew and the ite palm from which a type of flour was produced. Among the savannah peoples, water fowl, fish, turtles, caiman and deer were bountiful food sources, while during the rainy season there is evidence of sustenance from the forest such as sloth and monkeys. Hunter-gatherers of the rainforest sustained themselves on the abundance of fish at the end of the rainy season, along with a staple of wild nuts and wild prey.
From their early settlement in what is now Guyana, the indigenous peoples developed or maintained and extended their culture and heritage now being celebrated during Indigenous Heritage Month. With the history of slavery and indentureship, colonialism and independence, the history of Guyana’s indigenous peoples is now linked with the relatively new arrivals to add to the country’s diverse yet integrated heritage. (Photos taken from “Pages in Guyanese Prehistory” by Denis Williams. Walter Roth Museum of Anthropology, 1995)
