BONES OF MAMMALS FROM INDIAN SITES IN CUBA 

 AND SANTO DOMINGO 



Bv GERRIT S. MILLER, Jr. 



(With One Plate) 



Within the past few months the United States National Museum 

 has received two collections of bones of mammals dug from kitchen 

 middens in the island of Santo Domingo, West Indies. The first 

 and most important consists of two hundred and forty-two speci- 

 mens, representing probably about fifty individuals, procured at San 

 Pedro de Macoris, by Mr. Theodoor de Booy for the Museum of the 

 American Indian, Heye Foundation, New York City. A represen- 

 tative series has been presented to the National Museum by Mr. 

 George G. Heye. The second was made during September, 1916, 

 by Dr. W. L. Abbott in the caves near San Lorenzo where Gabb 

 rediscovered the genus Plagiodontia about the year 1870. It con- 

 sists of a dozen specimens all of which were given to the museum. 

 Finally Mr. Heye has sent for examination part of a lot of bones 

 collected at the " Big Wall," a former Indian village at Maisi, 

 Baracoa, Cuba. These remains were found " scattered all through 

 the site in conjunction with stone artifacts and fragments of pot- 

 tery." All of this material proves to be of great interest on account 

 of the light which it throws on the Antillean fauna that was asso- 

 ciated with early man. 



As lately as a year ago there existed \vide differences of opinion 

 as to the probability that the Antilles had ever been inhabited by a 

 mammal- fauna of continental character.* Cope, in 1868, had pointed 

 out that the geologically recent occurrence of a rodent (Amblyrhiza) 

 as large as a Virginia deer on the island of Anguilla, whose area is 

 only thirty square miles, indicated the former existence of a Carib- 

 bean continental area ; " but this fact seems to have been generally 

 lost sight of. It has all along been well known that bats occurred 

 throughout the archipelago, but they were supposed to have flown 



* See " Some remarks upon Matthew's Climate and Evolution " by T. Bar- 

 bour, with supplemental note by W. D. Matthew. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci., Vol. 

 27, pp. 1-15. January 25, 1916. 



' Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Philadelphia, 1868, p. 313. 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 66, No. 12 



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