Caquetios of the Plains of Venezuela

(Private commission)

The Caquetios were a large ethnic group that inhabited northwestern Venezuela and eastern Columbia since at least 900 CE, and belonged to the broader Arawakan linguistic family, one of the largest in the Americas.

They were primarily agriculturalists, cultivating crops such as maize, yuca, and camote, as well as fruit trees like the nanche, anon and jobo, among several others, though they also depended extensively on hunting and collecting wild flora, fishing and trading with the coast, the Andes and the Amazon.

The Caquetios lived in sizeable, often fortified villages comprised of several clusters of large multi-family houses, frequently arranged in rows of two to three homes, with population sizes reaching as far as several thousand people. These villages would sometimes congregate into large, intra or interethnic confederations/chiefdoms under the rule of a paramount Chief or Diao, reaching population sizes well into the tens, or even hundreds of thousands of people, such as was the case with the chiefdom of Barquisimeto and the chiefdom of Yaracuy.

The Caquetios depicted in the above illustration represent those that inhabited the floodplains of present-day Portuguesa and Cojedes, who adapted to the seasonal flooding of the region by building their settlements on mounds interconnected by elevated causeways. These will be familiar to those acquainted with the Olmec tradition of early Mesoamerica, though no evidence exists of equivalent monumental structures such as temple mounds, palaces or large complexes, as these polities seemed to have been largely egalitarian, with social distinctions represented rather humbly in house size and societal privileges likes polygamy and quantity/quality of ornaments.

Sadly, the arrival of European colonizers in the sixteenth century brought the collapse of Caquetio political power through warfare, displacement and enslavement, eventually melding into the growing mestizo population of northwestern Venezuela, though their cultural legacy would live on among them and related southern Arawako groups.