Ciishing.] 4UZ [Nov. li, 



customs and art originated, in the nortliern or inland region, and pro- 

 ceeded thence to the sea. 



I would again mention the wide prevalence in the keys, of the distinct- 

 ively conventional treatment of carved and incised work, — whether on 

 shell, bone, or stone, — illustrated by so many specimens in our collection, 

 in connection with its almost equally "wide prevalence on figures found 

 in the mounds ; which art-vogue was, it would seem, more at home in the 

 keys — more in accordance with a seaside environment that appears 1o 

 have originated these conventional forms and modes of treatment — than 

 in the lands of the north. The identity of costume represented, too, 

 in the case of the painted shell as compared with incised shell gorgets 

 and embossed copper-plates of Tennessee and Georgia, is obvious, as 

 may be seen by reference to the single illustration herewith furnished 

 in PI. XXXV, Fig. 3. 



It is significant that the forms, as well as the surface decorations of 

 the potteries which we found somewhat inland, in the more northerly 

 region of Tarpon Springs and of the Anclote (and this applies also to 

 shoreland-like examples of pottery that I have seen from the still fur- 

 ther interior and more northerly portions of Florida, and even from 

 western Georgia) were in many ways distinctive!}' and indisputably 

 derived from precisely such gourd- and woodenware and shell-shaped 

 vessels and utensils as we found in the keys. It was thus obviously the 

 pottery of a people who had been accustomed to use gourd-shells and 

 wood, more than clay, for the making of their vessels, and not only so, 

 but to use wooden vessels that had been made with cutting implements 

 of shark-teeth and shell. This Avas clearly evidenced in the hachured 

 surfaces of so many of the vessels ; in the reticulated surfaces of others 

 of them — which represented the end grainings of wood— and in the 

 fine, convoluted or concentric, stamped or incised designs obviously 

 derived from curly-grained wood or paddles made thereof, which char- 

 acterized the surface decoration of so much more of this pottery. When 

 we add to this the fact that here in the North and in the interior, the 

 points of many blades of flint were made not only in the usual lanceolate 

 or leaf-shaped form, but also in the asymmetrical form of shark's teeth, 

 and that now and then even exquisitely polished stone adzes were 

 formed as obviously in imitation of naturally curved shell adzes — such 

 as were constantly found in the keys — it is perfectly evident that the 

 peoples who built up, in the marshlands here, the hammocks, and built 

 near them the little lake-encircled mounds, were originally a people of 

 tlie sea, not of the mainland, were a people who had once lived as the 

 key dwellers-lived, on island mounds in the sea or its shoals, here using 

 such implements as their ancestors had there used, and carrying ances- 

 tral ideas of habitation and of utensils down from generation to genera- 

 tion, and so, slowly up into the land. 



The theory I have ventured toadvance heretofore, in regard to tlu- rela- 

 tion of kev builduiir in the sea to mound buildinii' on the hmd stron!::;'iV 



