304 MISCELLANEOUS INVESTIGATION IN FLORIDA. 
investigating various keys, we continued eastward, then northward, to Miami; to 
Fort Lauderdale on New river, where the Everglades were visited; and finally, to 
Lake Worth, which was the southern limit of our work during the season of 1896, 
As a result of this part of our journey of the season of 1904, we formed certain 
conclusions, and fortified others which we had previously expressed in print, 
namely : i 
(1) That while the shell deposits of the southwestern coast of Florida are of 
great interest as monuments of the aborigines, their contents offer little reward to 
the investigator.’ 
(2) That the sand mounds of the southern Florida coast were built mainly for 
domiciliary purposes, and that such as contain burials yield but little pottery, 
whole vessels being practically absent. 
(3) That these burial mounds contain but few artifacts of interest? and that 
such artifacts as are met with in the smaller ones, and superficially in the larger 
ones, are often of European origin, marking a strong contrast with the mounds of 
the northwestern Florida coast and of St. John's river. 
(4) That the failure of the aborigines to place earthenware with the dead, in 
mounds along the southern Florida coast, did not arise through lack of its posses- 
` sion, but rather that the custom of doing so did not obtain there. Fragments of 
earthenware, though fewer in number and of far inferior quality on an average than 
in central and northern Florida, are met with along the southern Florida coast. 
Similarly, along the whole eastern coast of Florida, entire vessels seem to be absent 
from the mounds,’ though inland, in the northern part of the peninsula, at least, 
whole vessels are fairly abundant. 
(5) That while the muck, 2. e. mud and organic matter, which fills the 
canals and small artificial harbors of the Ten Thousand islands, in one instance 
yielded so rich а reward to Mr. Cushing's labors, it seems likely, as Mr. Cushing 
believed, that the objects of wood found by him at the town of Marco, Key 
Marco, were present there through some particular cause, Certain it is that 
extensive digging in the muck by Mr. Cushing and by ourselves in other locali- 
ties, yielded nothing of wood, and that ditch-making and the like by the 
inhabitants of the Ten Thousand islands have brought to light, so far as we can 
learn, almost nothing of that material. An attempt to duplicate a discovery 
such as Mr. Cushing's would resemble a search for a needle in a hay-stack. 
We shall now describe certain work in detail. | 
' Incidentally it may be said that the great shell deposit on Bullfrog creek, Tampa Bay, described 
and figured in the Smithsonian Report for 1879, has since been entirely demolished to furnish material 
for streets of the town of St. Petersburg. It was reported that in the removal of the deposit nothing 
of interest was found. 
4 *It is said that the well-known mound at Miami, when demolished, yielded nothing except human 
ке * Mound Investigation on the East Coast of Florida," by Clarence B. Moore, Phila., 1896. 
Privately printed. 
The late Andrew E. Douglass spent years in investigating the mounds of the eastern coast, from 
St. Augustine in the north to Miami in the south, without finding an entire vessel. 
