The English word cay comes from the vanished Lucayans of the Bahamas
Every time someone mentions a Florida key or a Caribbean cay, they are using a Lucayan word. The islanders called themselves Lukku-Cairi, people of the islands, and cairi passed into Spanish as cayo. They were the first Indigenous Americans Columbus met, in October 1492, and within three decades they were gone from the Bahamas.
Their ancestors paddled dugout canoes north from Cuba or Hispaniola sometime between 500 and 800 CE. Great Inagua was a natural first stop, lying 80 kilometres from Cuba and 90 from Hispaniola, closer than any other Bahamian island, and its sites hold plenty of pottery imported from the larger islands. Elsewhere in the archipelago people developed their own shell-tempered ware, known as Palmetto Ware.
Over roughly 800 years the settlers spread across the chain, reaching around 40,000 people. Settlement was densest in the south-central islands and thinned out northward, since the north was occupied later; the driest southern islands, with under 800 millimetres of rain a year, also stayed sparse. Villages sat only on the nineteen largest islands or on cays less than a kilometre from them. Archaeologist William Keegan traces a route from Great Inagua through Acklins and Long Island, then out to Eleuthera, Andros and Grand Bahama. He argues that the Caicos sites reflect a later wave from Hispaniola after 1200, drawn by natural salt pans.
Scholars disagree about whether the Lucayans count as Taíno. Julian Granberry and Gary Vescelius say yes, Keegan calls the distinctions largely arbitrary, while L. Antonio Curet does not classify them that way. Their chiefdoms were smaller and simpler than those on Hispaniola, but they were plugged into wide trade networks: Columbus saw canoes trading with Cuba, and a piece of jadeite found on San Salvador appears to have come from Guatemala.
Columbus's diary is the only eyewitness account of them. Soon after contact the Spanish seized Lucayans as slaves, and by 1520 none remained in the Bahamas.
Source: Lucayan people
