124 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



ornaments. Nevertheless she was hanged by Governor Ovando, who 

 proceeded to found a town on the spot which he named Santa Maria 

 de la Vera Paz. 



The Xaraguanians, who practiced an intensive form of agriculture 

 dependent on irrigation, possessed a superior form of material culture 

 to that of the natives of Marien in the north where ample rainfall and 

 a fertile soil required less effort in agriculture to maintain an adequate 

 food supply. Oviedo mentions the fact that villages at Gros Morne 

 and elsewhere numbered several hundred houses. This was no doubt 

 an exaggeration on a par with the statement of Las Casas that the 

 entire island bore a population of 3,000,000. Spinden's estimate of 

 100,000 inhabitants is nearer the truth, as large sections of- the more 

 arid regions of central Haiti and Santo Domingo were uninhabited. 



There were in the mountainous areas and along the coast, particu- 

 larly in Samana in the northeast, and in Xaragua in the southwest, 

 representatives of hunting and fishing tribes that did not practice agri- 

 culture. Abundant traces of these people are to be seen in the shell 

 mounds of the Haitian littoral investigated by the writer. These shell 

 mounds were originally described as from caves in Samana, Santo 

 Domingo, by Gabb ; from Beata Island, off the south coast of Barahona 

 by Wetmore ; by Parish from lie a Vache, off the Caribbean coast of 

 southwestern Haiti ; and by the writer from sites on the Cul de Sac 

 and on the north coast of Haiti. 



An interesting archeological discovery is the recognizable sequence 

 in Arawak pottery wares from the several Arawak sites. The pottery 

 type predominant at the time of the Conquest is as yet not clearly es- 

 tablished. An enigma, however, is the tribal identification of the non- 

 pottery producing, shell-mound builders of the Haitian and Domini- 

 can littoral. Future investigation should bring out clearly the sequence 

 in Arawak culture and its northern and southern affiliations as also 

 its autonomous development as an island culture through study of the 

 several known major historical sites. Future investigations, however, 

 may never determine just what are the relations that once may have 

 existed between the shell-mound builders of the Haitian, Bahaman, 

 and Floridian coast. 



