Gushing.] "^J-^ [Nov. 6, 



The foregoing more or less speculative conclusions have been offered 

 tentatively, not as final, but for whatever value they maj' possess as 

 suggestions. After all, the collections and observations under consider- 

 ation are equally interesting whether these suggestions be true or not, 

 or only in part true. Quite aside from all this, the large proportion of ob- 

 jects in perishable material, recovered by us, renders our collections from 

 the keys unique in one respect at least ; serves to illustrate how very little, 

 after all, of the art of a Stone Age people (or in this case Shell Age 

 people) is really represented by the remains that are commonly found 

 on the camp sites and in the burial places of such peoples. Had my 

 collections and observations been confined to the shell, bone, horn, pot- 

 tery and other specimens in comparatively enduring materials found on 

 the keys, the art that they represent would have seemed exceedingly 

 crude, almost below the average of Stone Age art generally, here in 

 America. As it was, however, the carved and painted works in wood 

 alone, in these collections, served of themselves to indicate that here 

 were the remains of a people not only well advanced toward barbaric 

 civilization, but of a people with a very ancient and distinctive culture, 

 whose relations with other peoples may, through these same rare speci- 

 mens of their arts — that alone by immersion in the water courts were 



or arts upon others) travel very slowly by land — impeded as they are in their course if it 

 he long, by tribe after tribe, and danger after danger. But both arts and peoples travel 

 with the utmost facility by sea. Therefore, it must have been, if not by slower deriva- 

 tion through the key dwellers, then by a wholesale sort of intercourse by sea, that these 

 arts of the civilized peoples of Central America came to be so liberally represented 

 among the remains— especially certain ceremonial and decorative remains— of the In- 

 dians of our Southern States, if, indeed, they came from so far south northward and 

 were not, as I incline to think, distributed or inherited from some common centre. 



In this connection I will mention also, that Prof. Holmes has found probable traces of 

 Caribbean art in Florida. By an examination of the collections gathered by ourselves 

 as compared with those made by Mr. Clarence Moore throughout the eastern half of the 

 State, however, I find that these Caribbean art forms are less characteristic of our collec- 

 tions than of those from the easterly portion of the State, and even from the Atlantic 

 side of southern Georgia. While the art characteristics I am speaking of, chiefly 

 exhibited in the involuted and concentric surface decoration of paddled pottery, may 

 be accounted for as having originated independently both among the Caribbeans and 

 here throughout Floridian areas— from the graining of the wood of the paddles them- 

 selves, or of worn-out wooden vessels in Imitation of which this pottery was no doubt 

 at first made— still, there is a large degree of probability that the Caribs had more or 

 less impressed thei'- art, and even tliemselvcs, upon a portion of the native population 

 of Florida, long before the discovery. This probability is rendered the greater by the 

 linguistic correspondences which Dr. Albert S. Gatchet has clearly traced between the 

 languages of the aborigines of eastern Florida, the Timuquanans, and the Caribs. How- 

 ever, these Carib influences seem to have come into Florida, not by a westerly way, but 

 from the south and the east, possibly through the Lucayos or Bahamas Islands, the 

 inhabitants of which were williin historic times, as is well attested by the earliest writers, 

 in continual intercourse with the natives of the Florida Peninsula. Such truces of Antil- 

 lean art as are found in tlie region of the ancient key dwellers and further north on 

 the western, or Gulf coast, seem to be rather more ancient than the date of Caribbean 

 occupation, even of the West Indian Islands themselves, that is, they seem to be far 

 more Arawak than Caribbean, and this again coincides with the idea of a very far 

 outhern origin (in the beginning) of these peoples of the keys. 



