The Indigenous Technology Colonizers Couldn’t Conquer Without, Yet Historians Have Forgotten

First given as gifts to arriving explorers, it didn’t take long for colonizers to demand hammocks as tribute.

When Spanish conquistadors first arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, Indigenous islanders welcomed them with gifts. Within a week, Christopher Columbus and his men had received finely woven cotton hammocks. The Europeans had never seen anything like them.

They had no idea they’d just encountered a technology that would become a go-to piece of gear for Europeans trying to live, travel, and fight in tropical America.

Hammocks weren’t new to the Americas. Archaeological evidence from northern Brazil shows they were used as burial shrouds dating back between 3,750 and 8,590 years ago. By the time Europeans arrived, hammocks were everywhere across the Caribbean, Amazon basin, and South America’s Atlantic coast. They were used by dozens of Indigenous groups who had perfected the technology over millennia.

Yet this ancient Indigenous invention, critical to European colonial success, has been almost entirely overlooked by historians. Research published in the journal postmedieval reveals why: it contradicts the narrative that Europeans brought superior technology to less advanced peoples.

More Than Just a Bed

For Indigenous communities, hammocks marked every major life transition. Missionary Raymond Breton, living among the Kalinago people between 1642 and 1654, noticed the word for hammock shared linguistic roots with the word for womb. Mothers wove baby hammocks from palm fibers just before giving birth, and children moved directly from womb to hammock.

At life’s end, elders were buried wrapped in their hammocks, positioned in the same fetal posture “they had in the womb of their mother,” Breton wrote. The hammock accompanied a person from first breath to last.

Between birth and death, hammocks facilitated healing and spiritual practices. Davi Kopenawa, a 21st-century Yanomami shaman whose memoir helped inform the research, described how hammocks put the body into a receptive state for spiritual communication: “your body remains prone in its hammock but the xapiri fly off with our image and show us unknown things.”

Early colonial sources describe healers treating wounded patients as they lay in hammocks suspended in the air, with fires built on either side. The hammock wasn’t just furniture, it was part of the healing process itself.

Hammocks also mapped social relationships. The closer you were allowed to hang your hammock to another person, the deeper the relationship. Sharing a hammock was reserved for lovers and parents with young children.

How Europeans Got Hooked

Europeans learned about hammocks through Indigenous hospitality rituals designed to build alliances. French missionary Jean de Léry described elaborate Tupinamba welcoming ceremonies in 1550s Brazil. Visitors were seated in suspended cotton hammocks while women gathered around weeping in greeting, praising the guest. The host would pretend not to notice at first, busying himself making arrows, before finally offering food and conversation.

Europeans also encountered hammocks when Indigenous communities cared for sick or exhausted colonizers. Explorer Amerigo Vespucci wrote that during his expedition, “if any of our people got tired on the way, they carried them in their nets very comfortably.”

The technology solved practical problems Europeans hadn’t known how to handle. Hammocks kept sleepers cool in tropical heat while allowing warmth from fires below. They protected against snakes, ants, and other pests. One sleep study found that rocking in hammocks helps people fall asleep faster and influences sleep patterns.

From Gift to Weapon

Spanish colonizers quickly made hammocks part of their military toolkit. By 1519, Spanish officials categorized hammocks as essential goods alongside bread and beans. Walter Raleigh, leading an English expedition into Guyana in 1595, noted that “all the Spaniards” in hot countries used hammocks.

But Europeans forced Indigenous peoples to produce it. After Spain invaded Jamaica in 1509, “cotton became the first trade good,” Spanish priest Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote, “because they forced the people, especially the women, to make great cloths of cotton” for sails, shirts, and hammocks.

Archaeological remains on Mona Island show Indigenous laborers produced hammocks for their colonizers as forced tribute in the 1500s. Hammocks gifted in friendship rituals became tools furthering the dispossession of the communities that invented them.

The Contradiction at the Heart of Colonialism

Spanish chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo devoted an entire chapter to the “vile vices” of Indigenous people in the 1520s, including shamanic rituals performed in hammocks. His manuscript illustration showed a naked Indigenous person in a hammock, emphasizing its connection to practices colonizers used to justify conquest.

Yet in the same text, Oviedo praised hammocks as “very clean” beds where “one can sleep quite comfortably.” He provided detailed instructions on selecting the best trees for hanging them during woodland travel. He’d become a convert to the very technology he associated with Indigenous practices he publicly condemned.

This gap between what Europeans said about Indigenous technology and what they actually did with it captures a central contradiction in colonial history. European apologist Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda claimed Europeans were “the inventors of so many very useful and necessary things unheard of in those regions,” arguing this technological superiority justified conquest.

But colonizers survived by adopting Indigenous innovations they simultaneously dismissed as primitive.

Why History Forgot

Historians have paid minimal attention to hammocks, researchers Marcy Norton and John Kuhn argue, because of a persistent bias that characterizes Indigenous groups as less advanced than Europeans. Scholarship celebrates civilizations with monumental architecture and writing systems while overlooking technologies like hammocks — even though they fundamentally shaped colonial America and spread globally.

This bias particularly erases women’s contributions. Indigenous women manufactured hammocks, yet this technology of care escaped historical attention.

By the 1650s, French settlers had developed their own hammock styles distinct from Indigenous methods, showing how fully integrated the technology had become. Yet colonial apologists continued insisting Europeans brought civilization to the Americas, not the other way around.

Hammocks remain in use worldwide today. Their forgotten history reveals how technological innovation flowed in directions that contradict everything we’re taught about European expansion, and how colonizers built empires using the very technologies of the peoples they displaced.

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