in the Indian mounds, mullet is only 10 percent of the bone.
The most common fish that they were eating were pinfish,
pigfish, catfish, shark, stingray, and burrfish. They also
ate trout, redfish, mullet. You would think that it would
be mostly mullet. Now, it could be that they were just
gathering fish. Maybe that is what the ones that worked
there ate, or maybe they sent the mullet out whole. Like on
Cayo Costa, they used to split them and sell them, so you
would not find their bones on the mounds.
RC: I do not think that the Indians would be sending them out.
Do you?
E: Well, they had canals cut all across this place. Across
Pine Island and then across the mainland going into the
Caloosahatchee River they had canals thirty feet wide and
six feet deep. They had big rafts that they were taking
across these places or something that they could take across
these places in a straight line so they could stay out of
the weather and everything. They were probably shipping
fish inland from what they gathered here, and getting a lot
of vegetables and stuff, probably deer. We find a lot of
deer legs on the mounds, but we do not find the rest of the
parts, like it was butchered somewhere else. The whole deer
is not there. You do not find the heads and the horns, but
you find too damn many legs and ribs. They probably split
that stuff up and smoked it and cured it and brought that
in. For the size of some of those deer bones, they did not
seem to be key deer coming off of these islands out here.
Of course, they used all of those deer bones to make knives
and bone pins for fish hooks. For fish hooks they sometimes
took this deer bone and split it into splinters and
sharpened it on both ends. Then they tied it in the middle
for throat gorges. But they would have a trot line full of
them, baited, and the fish would swallow them.
Another thing that is in the mound is jacks. These are
amberjacks with those big cystated rib bones. These
amberjacks were twenty-five pounds and up. They are all
through the mound. How do you catch one of them things?
They are strong. I have never seen them back in the bays
where they [the Indians] could be spearing them. It seems
like an offshore fish. [There are] hardly any snook bones
in the mounds at all. It might have been that this was
cooler then, because there are no gumbo limbo seeds in the
mounds. We do not think those trees were here in the early
times. Right now they are on the northern edge of where
they can exist, so if it was a little cooler here then, and
it probably was if that many Indians lived out there, [there
were probably not many of them around].
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