BUSHNELL] NATIVE VILLAGES AND VILLAGE SITES 83 
simple covered platforms found among the Everglades were well 
suited to the climate and natural environment of the southern 
country. 
Muskhogean tribes extended eastward to the coast and unquestion- 
ably the Guale, of Spanish narratives, were of this stock. Their 
home was among the low islands and the adjacent mainland—the 
coast of the present State of Georgia. Here they were probably 
living in the early years of the sixteenth century, when visited by the 
Spanish explorers, who left a rather vague description of certain large 
structures seen by them. 
“There are some principal houses along that coast each one of 
which must have been intended among that people for a village, 
because they are very large and are made of very tall and very grace- 
ful pines; and above they leave their limbs and leaves, and after they 
leave a row or rank of pines as a wall and another at the other end 
. (i. e. side), leaving between a width of fifteen or thirty feet from one 
row to the other, and a length of perhaps three hundred or more feet. 
The limbs join above, and so there is no need of roof or covering, 
and yet they cover the whole upper part with mats very well placed, 
interwoven in the openings or prospects between the said pines, 
and within there are other pines crosswise to the surface of the first, 
which double the thickness of the wall. So the mud wall remains 
. thick and strong, because the timbers are near together: and in each 
of these said houses there may well be or be contained two hundred 
men, and live in them.” Other structures were mentioned having 
‘“valls of lime and stone (which lime they make of shells of sea 
oysters) and these are one and one-half times as high as a person, and 
the rest of that height one and one-half times that of a person is of 
pinetimbers, of which thereare many.”’ (Oviedo, (1), III, pp. 630-631.) 
These were evidently long, narrow structures, erected among the 
pines, which served as natural supports. The dimensions given may 
not be correct, nevertheless such extensive houses could have been 
reared by the native tribes and would not have differed greatly in 
size from the longest of the communal dwellings seen in early days 
among the Five Nations. The walls were constructed of wattle 
covered with clay which was applied in a plastic state and allowed to 
dry and harden. The branches of the bordering pines served as a 
netural roof or covering, but this was evidently augmented by 
“mats,” probably a thatch laid over a light framework. Whether 
this was in reality a great communal dwelling, as among the Iroquois, 
or served the purpose of the large, circular town house of later genera- 
tions, May never be known, but in later years the latter form was 
encountered among the Guale, in their village along the coast north- 
ward from St. Augustine, 
