The Cueva were an indigenous people that lived in the Darién region of eastern Panamá. They were completely exterminated between 1510 and 1535 due to the effects of Spanish colonisation.

The Darién region formerly occupied by the Cueva became populated by the Kuna after their westward expansion during the 17th and 18th centuries. A vocabulary of the Kuna mistakenly identified as Cueva has led to the confusion of the Kuna with the Cueva where some authors report that the Cueva are related to or are ancestors of the Kuna (Adelaar & Muysken 2004: 62). The Kuna language and culture are very different from the Cueva.

Language

Loewen (1963) and Constenla Umaña & Margery Peña (1991) have suggested a connection between the Cueva language and the Chocoan family. More speculative proposals include Cueva under the Chibchan family.

As mentioned above, in 1968 ?estmír Loukotka erroneously treated a Cuna vocabulary as a sample of the Cueva language. This error has been repeated in subsequent works (e.g. Greenberg 1987, Whitehead 1999).

See also

• Choco languages
• Kuna (people)

Bibliography

• Adelaar, Willem F. H.; & Muysken, Pieter C. (2004). The languages of the Andes. Cambridge language surveys. Cambridge University Press.
• Campbell, Lyle. (1997). American Indian languages: The historical linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-509427-1.
• Constenla Umaña, Adolfo; & Margery Peña, Enrique. (1991). Elementos de fonología comparada chocó. In Filología y lingüística (No. 17, 1-2, pp. 137-191). San José: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica.
• Greenberg, Joseph H. (1987). Language in the Americas. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
• Loewren, Jacob A. (1963). Chocó II: Phonological problems. International Journal of American Linguistics, 29 (4), 357-371.
• Loukotka, ?estmír. (1968). Classification of South American Indian languages. Los Angeles: Latin American Studies Center, University of California.
• Romoli, Kathleen. (1987). Los de la lengua de Cueva: Los grupos indígenas del istmo oriental en la época de la conquista española. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología, Instituto Colombiano de Cultura (Ediciones Tercer Mundo).
• Whitehead, Neil L. (1999). The crises and transformations of invaded societies: The Caribbean (1492-1580). In F. Salomon & S. B. Schwartz (Eds.), The Cambridge history of the native peoples of South America: South America (Vol. 3, Pt. 1, pp. 864-903). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.