388 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



has dealt exhaustively with the subject 1 , that there is nothing in 

 these monuments that the Indians could not have done, that 

 many have been erected or continued in post-Columbian times, 

 consequently by the present aborigines, and that there is therefore 

 no reason for ascribing them to any other race of which we have 

 no knowledge. 



This general conclusion is in no way opposed to M. de 

 Nadaillac's suggestion that the mounds were certainly the work 

 of Indians, but of more civilised tribes than the present Algon- 

 quians, by whom they were driven south to Florida, and there 

 found with their towns, council-houses, and other structures 

 by the first white settlers 2 . It would appear, however, from 

 Mr F. H. Cushing's investigations, that these tribal council- 

 houses of the Seminole Indians were a local development, 

 growing up on the spot under conditions quite different from 

 those prevailing in the north. Many of the vast shell-mounds, 

 especially between Tampa and Cape Sable, are clearly of artificial 

 structure, that is, made with definite purpose, and carried up 

 symmetrically into large mounds comparable in dimensions with 

 the Indian mounds of the interior. They originated with pile 

 dwellings in shallow water, where the kitchen refuse, chiefly 

 shells, accumulates and rises above the surface, when the building 

 appears to stand on posts in a low mound. Then this type of 

 structure comes to be regarded as the normal for house-building 

 everywhere. " Through this natural series of changes in type 

 there is a tendency to the development of mounds as sites for 

 habitations and for the council-house of the clan or tribe, the 

 sites being either separate mounds or single large mounds, accord- 

 ing to circumstances. Thus the study of the living Seminole 

 Indians and of the shell-mounds in the same vicinity... suggests 

 a possible origin for a custom of mound-building at one time so 

 prevalent among the North American Indians 3 ." But if this be 

 the genesis of such structures, the custom must have spread from 

 the shores of the Gulf inland, and not from the Ohio valley south- 

 wards to Florida. 



1 Twelfth Annual Report of tJie Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, 1894. 



2 L? Anthropologies 1897, p. 702 sq. 



3 Sixteenth An. Report Bur. Ethnology, Washington, 1897, p. Ivi sq. 



