ADMINISTRATIVE REPORT 11 



visited. These still retain some of their old customs, as 

 making cassava from the poisonous roots of the manihot, 

 and preserve a few words of their native tongue. A brief 

 vocabulary was obtained, but Carib is no longer habitually 

 spoken in St. Vincent. 



The fertile island of St. Kitts and the neighboring Nevis 

 were found to be particularly instructive archeologically. 

 Both have several extensive middens and well-preserved 

 pictographs, the former having yielded many artifacts 

 that illustrate the material culture of its pre-Carib 

 inliabitants. Through the courtesy of Mr. Comiell his 

 large collection, which adequately illustrates the culture of 

 St. Kitts and Nevis, was placed at the disposal of Dr. 

 Fewkes for the purjjose of study, and he was permitted to 

 make drawings of the more tyi3ical objects, one of the most 

 instructive of which is a sculptured torso from Nevis. 



In Barbados Dr. Fewkes examined the midden at Indian 

 River, on the west coast, from which site the important 

 Taylor archeological collection was gathered. Several 

 other middens were visited on the lee coast from Bridge- 

 town to the northern end of the island, where a marly hill 

 strewn with i^otsherds was observed. He also examined 

 the so-called "Indian excavations" at Freshwater Bay 

 and others at Indian River, and visited several cave shel- 

 ters on the island. The most noteworthy of these caves 

 are situated at Mount Gilboa and in the Scotland district, 

 St. Lucy Parish. To one of these, known as the ' ' Indian 

 Castle," described in 1750 by the Rev. Griffith Hughes, 

 who claims to have found therein an idol and other un- 

 doubted Indian objects, Dr. Fewkes devoted much atten- 

 tion. The gulches so characteristic of Barbados were 

 favorite resorts of the aborigines, and, judging by the 

 artifacts, furnished cave shelters for them. Although 

 uninhabited at the tune of its discovery, there is evidence 

 of a considerable prehistoric aboriginal population in Bar- 

 bados, whose culture was influenced largely by the charac- 

 ter of the material from which their artifacts were made, 

 most of them being fashioned from shell instead of stone — 



