AFFILIATION'S OF SANTO DOMINGAN POTTERY 119 



any scheme of culture sequence or hypothesis regarding the crude 

 pottery forms frequently appearing in village sites and in caves 

 in Santo Domingo and in Cuba to attribute such undecorated pot- 

 tery form to a prepottery or early pottery-making tribe. J. R. 

 Swanton ^* thinks that not enough of the language of the Ciboneys 

 has been preserved to enable us to state positively that they were 

 distinct from the Arawak. This theory is substantiated in the fact 

 that finds of the cruder forms of pottery are never isolated but 

 always occur in conjunction with the more elaborate Arawak forms. 

 This holds true regardless of whether the crude i^ottery is from a 

 cave containing other supposedly Ciboney artifacts or from open 

 village sites. 



Harrington remarks regarding possible culture contacts between 

 the tribes of the southeastern United States, of Yucatan, and those 

 of the Antilles that — 



The writer has yet to see a single object from Cuba suggesting the Maya art 

 of Yucatan. With regard to the southeastern part of the United States, what 

 little influence there was among the more advanced peoples seems to have 

 passed from the islands to the mainland, and not vice versa, for we find 

 throughout the area covered by the " southeastern " type of culture, from the 

 Gulf to Tennessee, and from the Atlantic to eastern Texas, the typical Tainan 

 type of bowl — the cazuela. Gushing apparently had in mind certain simlarly 

 hypothetical primitive Antillean culture influences of the Ciboney type.^s It is 

 a curious fact that of all the pottery discovered by us actually in the muck 

 deposits of Key Marco, only tray-shaped vessels, and either shallow or hemi- 

 spherical and deep, sooty, cooking, or heating bowls of black earthenware, 

 were found. Nearly all wei-e crushed. One small shallow bowl contained a 

 thick mass of black rubber gum intermixed with crushed shell and other 

 substance of precisely the kind that was used for cement and paint material. 

 Other and larger examples contain almost equally thick coatings of partly charred 

 food, inside, and incrustations of soot outside. Only a single ornamental 

 fragment was found. This was the conventionalized figurehead of a crested 

 bird, quite such as is found on many of the traylike bowls of earthenware 

 from the ancient mounds of the Mississippi Valley. But it had been drilled 

 and reshaped, to some extent, to serve as a weight or pendant. 



Similarities in Floridian and Santo Domingan earthenware forms 

 and decorative designs do not pertain to ceremonial identity of 

 origin but show identity of ornamental technic and shape. Some 

 of these features listed here are significant of an early or recent 

 cultural diffusion; others show merely an orderly development in 

 pottery decorative art such as would naturally take place among 

 peoples having reached a common degree of enlightenment. The fol- 

 lowing examples are selected at random and their number might be 

 increased almost indefinitely. 



^ Southern Contacts of the Indians North of the Gulf of Mexico. Twentieth Congr. 

 Int. Amcrlcanistas, Rio de Janeiro, 1922. 



ss Gushing, F. H., A Preliminary Report on the Exploration of Ancient Key-Dweller 

 Remains on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Proc. Amer. Philos. Soc, vol. 35, no. 153, 1897. 



