Arawak Settlement on Florida Peninsula

(10) It is by virtue of this statement that an Arawak settlement is indicated on the Florida peninsula in one of the latest linguistic maps of the Bureau of American Ethnology. If such frequent communication took place between Cuba and Florida immediately after white contact, why may it not have taken place before? And if it took place between Cuba and Florida, why not between Cuba and Yucatan ? From the western end of Cuba to the northernmost point of Yucatan is about 130 miles, approximately the same distance as from Cuba to the mainland of the Florida peninsula, although from Key West to Cuba it is about 40 miles less. From Key West to Yucatan the distance is a little less than 400 miles. We may add that from Florida to the island of Great Bahama the distance is somewhat less than the distance from Key West to Cuba, 65 miles, and to the Little Bimini Islands it is only 50 miles. It would indeed seem strange if the episode recorded by Fontaneda had not taken place between these various islands and peninsulas many tunes during the prehistoric period and if considerable bodies of Indians had not sought out new homes in one direction or another across the straits.
     While underlying racial movements of the sort just indicated may be discovered by physical anthropologists, evidence from other sources is astonishingly negative in view of the probabilities. Instead of occupying intermediate or transitional positions in larger linguistic or cultural areas, southern Florida, western Cuba, and northern Yucatan rather convey the impression of marginal territories. Beginning with the, last we find that through it was the seat of one of the highly developed civilizations in America, a civilization dating back beyond the Christian era, students of this Mayan culture have demonstrated that the older states constituting it were in the mountainous country to the southward and that the Mayan states in Yucatan proper did not rise to prominence until considerably later.
(11) The West. Indian archipelago, as is well known, received at least two successive waves of immigration from South America in prehistoric times, one consisting of peoples of the Arawakan linguistic stock, the second of the remotely related Caribs. And, as is also well known, these latter drove out or absorbed their predecessors in these islands lying .nearer to South America, the Lesser Antilles. They might have done the same in the larger islands or Greater Antilles had not European discovery and colonization put a stop to the process when they had reached the eastern end of Porto Rico. The researches of M. R. Harrington have substantiated an earlier opinion of 'Dr. J. W. Fewkes that the western end of Cuba was occupied by a people whose occupancy of the island antedated that, ,of the Arawak. and he believes that these people, whom he calls "Ciboneys", represent an earlier wave of immigration into the West Indies as a whole, but not enough of their language has been preserved to enable 'us to state positively that they were distinct from the Arawah
(12)  Turning to Florida we find that, at the discovery, the central and northern part of the peninsula, including a small section of the adjacent state of Georgia, but excluding all of that part, of Florida west of Ocilla River, was populated by a number of tribes speaking dialects markedly divergent from those of the tribes north of them. These arc called the Timucua and they have been grouped into a distinct stock called the Timuquanan. South of them again, from a little below Tampa Bay and a, little above Cape Canaveral, were people of another linguistic group. Unfortunately two or three expressions in Fontaneda's Memoir and a considerable number of place names are all of their language known to be in existence. This is enough to prove that there was but one language in southern Florida, or at least that all of the languages there were closely related, but it proves nothing more with certainty. However, in a forthcoming publication of the Bureau of American Ethnology I have adduced evidence tending to show that this language - or these languages- actually belonged to the Muskhogean stock, the same as that of the Creeks, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, and that it was probably rather close to the one last mentioned. Since the argument is, presented in full in that publication.

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Southern Contacts of the Indians North of the Gulf of Mexico, 1924

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