10 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. ^6 



provisions brought in the vessels. The rest of the dwellings, with the temple, 

 were thrown down, and every mess of three or four soldiers made a cabin, 

 Vi^herein they lodged. The ground about was very fenny, and encumbered with 

 dense thicket and high trees. The Governor ordered the woods to be felled 

 the distance of a crossbow-shot around the place, that the horses might run, 

 and the Christians have the advantage, should the Indians make an attack at 

 night.' 



The third type of building in a prehistoric Florida settlement is 

 readily distinguished from those on the other mounds. Like the 

 others it has no stone walls or permanent indication of the same. 

 Its foundation is not as distinctive but is smaller than the kitchen 

 middens already mentioned above. It is called in the above descrip- 

 tion the Chief's House or Temple. 



The fourth type is distinguished by its contents. This is the place 

 where the remains of the dead were buried, the cemetery, a low- 

 mound of sand and refuse covered with trees and bushes of various 

 kinds, rising hardly more than four feet above the general surface 

 of the ground, approximately circular in form. A preliminary shal- 

 low trial pit dug on one side of this mound revealed the existence of 

 Indian bones mingled with pottery fragments in such abundance that 

 as the work progressed these trial pits were enlarged, extending 

 wholly across the mound. This type was the main scene of the 

 excavations and a little more than one-third of the mound (pi. 5, 

 A-D) was opened and the earth from the surface to base removed, 

 preserving all the objects that were found from day to day. 



The author's belief is that the foundation of this mound was 

 a low hill or sand dune formed by blown coral sand in which the 

 aborigines with their primitive implements could easily make a grave. 

 No stones of any kind interfered with the excavations; the knoll or 

 dune chosen for a cemetery was apparently not unlike hundreds 

 of others along the west coast of Florida. The cemetery was incon- 

 spicuous when work began and is probably one of many that will 

 be later discovered. 



STRATIFICATION OF WEEDEN CEMETERY 



Three layers, irregular in thickness, often lacking definite lines of 

 separation, can be differentiated in Weeden Mound, but two of these 



' The village as well as the chief was called Ucita. The site of this village 

 has been variously determined. The majority of authors place Ucita (town) 

 on Tampa Bay, near the present city of Tampa. The author has been greatly 

 aided in his historical studies of southern Florida by Dr. J. R. Swanton, Ethnol- 

 ogist of the Bureau of American Ethnology. (See Bull. TZ' Bur. Am. Ethn.) 



