The Calusa believed that the three souls were the pupil of a person's eye, his shadow, and his reflection. Our open community is dedicated to digging into the origins of our species on planet earth, and question wherever the discoveries might take us. A diorama of a Calusa chief in the Florida Museum of Natural History. It has been proposed that as fishing was a less time-consuming means of obtaining food than hunting and gathering, the Calusa were able to devote more time to other pursuits, such as the establishment of a system of government. Because of their reliance on shellfish, they accumulated large shell middens during this period. 1). Native American tattoos New Evidence Shows Humans Were Using Bows and Arrows in 52,000 BC. At least three of the animal figureheads were found in close association with wooden humanlike masks which Cushing understood to represent the human form of that animal. The Calusa Indians, who live in southwest Florida, are weakened by epidemics. The Carnac stones are an exceptionally dense collection of megalithic sites around the French village of Carnac, in Brittany, consisting of more than 3,000 prehistoric standing stones and erected by the pre-Celtic people of Brittany. . ( Public Domain ), Featured image: Calusa people fishing. Understanding the Mysterious Kingdom of Shambhala, Dont Cross the Kobolds: Mischievous Spirits of European Folklore, The Curious Apparitions of Pagan Goddesses to the German Knights Templar, The Truth Behind the Christ Myth: Ancient Origins of the Often Used Legend Part I, The Gristhorpe Man: A Bronze Age Skeleton with a Story to Tell, The Origins of Human Language: One of the Hardest Problems in Science, Translation of 5,500-Year-Old Babel Text from China Reveals Oldest Known Map of Inner Solar System, A Blazing Weapon: Unraveling the Mystery of Greek Fire. And, although some of Cushings ideas about the Indians he had discovered and their relationship to tribes in the Caribbean and South America have not remained popular among scholars, his descriptive notes and insights are of unquestionable value. Florida Museum of Natural History Florida and Georgia archaeologists have discovered the location of Fort San Antn de Carlos, home of one of the first Jesuit missions in North America. At the time of European contact in the 16th and 17th centuries, the historic Calusa were the people of the Caloosahatchee culture. Florida Museum artifact photos by Jeff Gage. After the outbreak of war between Spain and England in 1702, slaving raids by Uchise Creek and Yamasee Indians allied with the Province of Carolina began reaching far down the Florida peninsula. One of the most popular Native American sports was lacrosse. Calusa Protective Spell-Tampa This piece of folklore came from my co-worker, who grew up in Tampa, Florida. Their territory was bounded in northwest Florida by the Aucilla and Ochlockonee rivers, and . The drove back multiple conquistadors and had control of nearby tribes. The Calusa Native Americans. In 1513 Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon sailed northwest from the island of Hispaniola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic) with a three-year royal contract to discover rich lands thought to lie in that direction. 3). After ten days a man who spoke Spanish approached Ponce de Len's ships with a request to wait for the arrival of the Calusa chief. Franciscan friar Fray Lopez, director of the unsuccessful 1697 mission attempt, described the Calusa temples as very tall and wide, with a mound in the middle and a structure on the mound enclosed with reed mats and containing benches around the walls. Calusa v. Iroquois: Religious Beliefs. The Spanish A research project has finally solved an archaeological mystery in America . Fish bones and scales recovered from one of the watercourts indicate the Calusa were capturing schooling species such as mullet, pinfish and herring. Those excavations revealed rarely preserved objects of wood, such as masks, figureheads, bowls, and tools, which survived because of the wet environment. [14], The Calusa lived in large, communal houses which were two stories high. The expedition was sponsored jointly by The University Museum (then the Free Museum of Science and Art) and the Bureau of American Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution. Field school students brush sand from a tabby wall that might be the outer wall of Fort San Antn de Carlos. [13][11] Artifacts of wood that have been found include bowls, ear ornaments, masks, plaques, "ornamental standards", and a finely carved deer head. One illustration of the sophistication of the Calusa can be found in eyewitness accounts of an event in 1566. By the 1700s though, the Tequesta people had disappeared. They fished and hunted for their food and would catch things like: mullet, catfish, eels, turtles, deer, conchs, clams, oysters, and crabs. The Calusa and their legacy: South Florida people and their environments. Some of the "Spanish Indians" (often of mixed Spanish-Indian heritage) who worked at the fishing camps likely were descended from Calusa.[29]. The Horsemen of Oyo were legendary warriors who served the Oyo Empire of West Africa. Seeing the work of the Calusa in these materials first-hand were really exciting moments for us.. Request Answer. Mound Key Archaeological State Park is a shell midden mound in the Estero Bay that is estimated to have been inhabited over 2,000 years ago. The leaders included the paramount chief, or "king"; a military leader (capitn general in Spanish); and a chief priest. Cushings excavations took place along the coast. Mudlarker Finds Bronze Age Shoe on a UK Riverbank Dated 2,800 Years Old! The Spanish were used to dealing with natives who farmed and who provided the Spanish with some of their food. They had lived in the region since the 3rd century BCE (the late Archaic period of the continent ), and remained for roughly 2,000 years, [1] By the 1800s, most had died as a result of settlement battles, slavery, and disease. AtAncient Origins, we believe that one of the most important fields of knowledge we can pursue as human beings is our beginnings. Around A.D. 1250, the area experienced a drop in sea level that, according to research team member Karen Walker, collections manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History, may have impacted fish populations enough to have prompted the Calusa to design and build the watercourts. The story of the Calusa during the Spanish occupation of La Florida is a complicated one, said Thompson. Said by a Spaniard, Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, who was a captive among them for many years, to mean "fierce people," but it is perhaps more probable that, since it often appears in the form Carlos, it was, as others assert, adopted by the Calusa chief from the name of the Emperor Charles V, about whose greatness he had learned from Spanish prisoners. It is believed that Calusa translated to mean "Fierce People". //-->. Escampaba may be related to a place named Stapaba, which was identified in the area on an early 16th-century map. 9). The Calusa Indians were originally called the "Calos" which means "Fierce People". [26], For more than a century after the Avils adventure, there was little contact between the Spanish and Calusa. For a long time, societies that relied on fishing, hunting and gathering were assumed to be less advanced, said Marquardt. As Cushing noted and as more recent studies have revealed, they dug extensive waterways or canals (sometimes as large as 4 feet deep, 20 feet wide, and 3 miles long) that crossed Key Marco and the rest of the region. Tribute was offered in the form of prestige goods, such as feathers, mats, deerskins, food, and metals and captives recovered from Spanish shipwrecks (Hudson 1976). The Calusa gathered a variety of wild berries, fruits, nuts, roots and other plant parts. 215.898.4000. The Calusa have long fascinated archaeologists because they were a fisher-gatherer-hunter society that attained unusual social complexity, said William Marquardt, curator emeritus of South Florida Archaeology and Ethnography at the Florida Museum of Natural History. They believed in three superior beings, one controlled the weather, the others ruled the welfare of the tribe and warfare. It has been speculatively identified as Calusa in origin. Marquardt notes that the Calusa turned down the offer of agricultural tools from the Spanish, saying that they had no need for them. The women were responsible for work around the house, like cooking and raising the children. Spanish admiral Pedro Menndez de Avils (1519-1574) by Francisco de Paula Mart (1762-1827) ( Public Domain ). Little is known about Calusa religion. The most powerful ruler governed the physical world, the second most powerful ruled human governments, and the last helped in wars, choosing which side would win. While the Calusa managed to survive that encounter, the 250 years that followed brought intermittent contact with other conquistadors, Christians missionaries, and in later years, English and French explorer-traders who vied for the territory, often with the help of native allies. These massive, rectangular structures built of shell and sediment enclose large areas on both sides of the mouth of Mound Keys great canal, a marine highway nearly 2,000 feet long and about 100 feet wide that bisects the island. The archaeologists were surprised to discover the Spanish used a primitive shell concrete known as tabby to stabilize the wall posts of their wooden structures. One ritual was witnessed in which a large procession of masked men came down from a mound accompanied by hundreds of singing women (Goggin and Sturtevant 1964). Missions to the Calusa, edited and translated by John H. Hann. We do not fully understand the complexities of what happened to them. We could not anticipate the extraordinary preservation of organic materials down below the water table, Marquardt noted. By interceding with these spirits, it was believed that the chief was ensuring that his people would be well-supplied by the land. 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