MAMMALS EATEN BY INDIANS, OWLS, AND 



SPANIARDS IN THE COAST REGION OF 



THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC 



By GERRIT S. MILLER, JR. 



curator, division of mammals, u. s. national museum 

 (With Two Plates) 



In February and March, 1928, I visited the Samana Bay region, 

 northeastern Dominican Republic with the special object of obtaining 

 remains of mammals in the Indian deposits that had been previously 

 examined by Gabb in 1 869-1 871 and Abbott in 19 16- 1923. I was 

 accompanied by Mr, H. W. Krieger, who had charge of the strictly 

 ethnological side of the work. Together or separately we obtained 

 material from six localities : four on the south shore of Samana Bay ; 

 one, Anadel, near Samana town, on the north shore of the bay; and 

 one, a large Indian site at the mouth of the Rio San Juan, on the 

 Atlantic coast, across the peninsula from Samana.' Mr. Krieger re- 

 turned alone the following winter and revisited the places that we had 

 previously worked. He also made excavations in two village sites 

 not far from Monte Cristi at the northeastern extremity of the 

 Republic. 



At all of these localities we obtained many bones of mammals from 

 the heaps of Indian refuse. Only once, however, in a lateral recess 

 about half way up the sloping floor of the cave that occupies most 

 of the islet of San Gabriel, off the south shore of the bay, did we 

 find an owl-made deposit of extinct mammals. Here, as at St. Michel, 

 Haiti, the small living barn owl had plentifully bestrewn the surface 

 with dejecta containing bones of bats, small birds, and the introduced 

 European rats and mice. Immediately beneath its surface the cave 

 floor material was intermingled with the bones of the larger native 

 rodents that had been devoured by the great extinct owl. This deposit 

 was not more than two feet deep, and, unlike the kitchenmidden 

 lying in the lower level of the cave, it was considerably hardened 



^ A general account of this work was published in Expl. and Field- Work 

 Smithsonian Inst., 1928, Smithsonian Publ. No. 3011, pp. 43-54, March 22, 1929. 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 82, No. 5 



