12 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. jd 



Florida and the question who these people were is difficult to answer. 

 It will be later discussed but provisionally it may be said that Florida 

 was considered an island by the inhabitants of the Bahamas, to 

 which they applied the name Cautio. We may call its inhabitants the 

 Cautians. The author regards the Ciboney of Cuba and the Lucayans 

 of Bahama as directly related to them culturally. We know they 

 visited each other, which implies a close kinship.^ The Ciboney or 

 original people of Cuba and the Lucayans were a shell-heap people. 

 Both were very little acquainted with pottery making, but had a 

 few ornaments of shell. In many respects they were retarded in 

 their cultural development and in about the same condition as the 

 Cautians whose remains occur in Florida in this lower layer. 



In other words, it is believed that there were two waves of immi- 

 grants into Florida in prehistoric times ; one from the north, which 

 brought with it the articles akin to those of Georgia, illustrated in 

 the upper layer of the cemetery at Weeden Island, and another like 

 those of the West Indies, corresponding to the lower layer, which 

 were submerged by an influx of the northern clans, whose origin 

 is yet wholly unknown. It is supposed that the archaic population 

 of Florida was practically identical with the earliest people of Cuba, 

 and in order to determine whether there was any difference in the 

 crania of the peoples in the two layers of the stratification, the author 

 had prepared a map, the numbers on which, reaching 444 entries, 

 correspond with skulls and bones which were found at dififerent 

 depths. It is hoped that an examination by some anthropologist will 

 aid in the deciphering of this problem. A few facts regarding the col- 

 lection of somatological material may be instructive but a determina- 

 tion of racial relations is not attempted. 



HUMAN BURIALS 



The majority of human burials in the Weeden Mound were sec- 

 ondary, or those in which the skeletons had been stripped of flesh, 

 done up in bundles, and later interred in that condition. There were 

 instances of extended and flexed interments but in the majority of 

 cases the smaller bones were not present ; the larger bones of the 

 arms, legs, and sometimes vertebrse, were bunched together. There 

 were several instances where only the skull (pi. y, A) was found 

 and in others the bones of the arms and legs alone remain. These 

 bones were commonly buried upright, not extended. They were 

 very fragile and were preserved with considerable difficulty. 



^ An Indian village, Tergesta, once stood on about the same site as Miami 

 and the interchange between it and Cuba or the Bahamas appears to have 

 been frequent 



