10,000 BCE – 1580

Indigenous Guiana and European Contact

Hunters, shell mounds and the Wild Coast

Indigenous peoples have lived in the Guiana lands for thousands of years. Hunter-gatherers were followed by farming societies, and by the later centuries before contact the coast and rivers were home to Lokono (Arawak), Kalina (Carib) and Warao communities, with savanna and highland peoples in the interior. Trade networks linked coast and highlands. Europeans first sighted the coast from 1498, when Columbus reached the mainland, and Ojeda and Vespucci sailed along it in 1499. Spain claimed the region under the Treaty of Tordesillas but its El Dorado expeditions mostly followed the Orinoco, leaving the Essequibo and Demerara largely to Indigenous nations.