1S96.] 409 [Gushing. 



sidered in connection with the trend from south nortliwardly past tlie 

 keys, of tlie main current of tlie Caribbean sea (as sliown in PI. XXV) 

 and Avitli tlie usual course of the great but intermittent Gulf hurricanes, it 

 seems to me highly probable that not from the mainland, but from the 

 sea, not from the north, but from the far south, the primitive or earliest 

 key dwellers, whoever they were, came or were wafted in the begin- 

 ning. While it is true that only a few years after the discovery by Co- 

 lumbus, the earliest voyagers to the Gulf of Maracaibo found peoples liv- 

 ing there (as some few of them still live) in pile-supported houses out in 

 the midst of the shallow waters, and hence named the country Venezuela 

 or "Little Venice," and while it is also true that this current of the 

 Caribbean Sea thence takes up and is thence reinforced by the current 

 of the mighty Orinoco, still I do not believe that the derivation of these 

 foreign arts of the key dwellers, or of the key dwellers themselves, may 

 be traced quite so directly as that. I believe, rather, that here and there 

 all through the waters washing the shores of lands southward from 

 Florida — of Cuba, of Yucatan, of northern South America — we shall 

 shortly find, unless the maps deceive me, evidence of a former very wide 

 distribution in that direction of the key-dweller phase of life, and it has 

 seemed to me that as the key dwellers of Florida may have l)orrowed 

 from these older and more wideh' distributed peoples of their kind (who 

 were probably more of South American than of North American extrac- 

 tion) so other peoples along that lengthy way, may also probably have 

 derived many of their characteristics, and some small proportion of their 

 populations perhaps. A study, for instance, of the ruined cities of Yu- 

 catan and some other portions of Central America, makes it clear that 

 although the Mayas and other peoples who built them had advanced to 

 a remarkable stage of barbaric civilization, and were possessed of a very 

 highly developed architecture, yet they were at most, only highly, ad- 

 vantageously developed and elaborated, mound builders. The fact, now 

 well known, that they entered Yucatan with arts nearly perfected and 

 were themselves correspondingly advanced in culture when they came 

 thither from the sea (as they claimed), seems to bear out the supposition 

 that they owed their habits of high foundation building, their many arts 

 almost perfected from the beginning of their occupancy, and to some 

 extent their OAvn origin, to a key-dwelling phase of existence.* 



*I am not alone in thus having found a decided correspondence between the arts of 

 the ancient Floridians and other Southern Indians and those of ancient Yucatan. Other 

 observers, in particular Dr. Daniel G. Brinton, Profs. F. W. Putnam, William H. Holmes, 

 Frederick Starr and Dr. Cyrus Thomas, have noted umistakable similarities between the 

 arts of Yucatan and Mexico, and those of the mound builders of the Gulf States. I think 

 it has been held that these arts traveled overland in some way along the far-reaching 

 western and northern Gulf shores from south northward. As I have already stated, 

 however, arts, and especially ceremonial and decorative art forms, do not readily travel 

 from one tribe to another, are not easily adopted by one primitive people from another, 

 unless both peoples are in a very similar grade of cultural development or share a com- 

 mon environment in which these arts are natural and at home. Moreover, it is to be 

 reflected that not only arts, but also peoples (in sufficient numbers to impress their culture 



