These colonists had a vessel in which they carried fish as part of their provisions. This information reminds us of the fact that the early Americans were largely dependent on sea-food for their subsistence as proved by the contents of the shell heaps, or kitchen middens.
SHELL HEAPS
These are found along the coasts of America and inland by the rivers. There are such remnants from a distant past in Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Tennessee, Florida, California, Oregon, Alaska, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Terra del Fuego.
Some of these mounds are very large, covering from sixty to one hundred acres, or even larger. Some are only a few feet high, while others are over forty feet in height. In some localities they are quite numerous. Colonel Island, Georgia, is said to be covered with them. Forty of such have been explored.
The contents of these mounds show the people around whose dwellings they accumulated engaged in fishing as well as hunting. They have yielded the bones of the elk, the beaver, the seal, the mud turtle, the great auk, the wild turkey, as well as the reindeer and the dog. Bones of fishes and reptiles have also been found, but more particularly shells of mussels and oysters. At the bottom of one, a pit in one of these mounds in Little Miami Valley, Florida, a Mr. F. W. Putnam found a large quantity of carbonized corn, covered with husks and matting of reeds indicating agriculture and a sedentary life.
The date of the early shell heaps is unknown, but it is certain that they are the accumulations of many generations. Those in California are considered more recent than those in Florida.
The shell heaps, as the name indicates, are simply the refuse, the garbage, left behind when the people departed for new homes, or camping grounds. But they also contain so many objects of value to students of ancient cultures. Deposits in Peru have yielded, among other things, little figures of gold and of silver, representing fishes. Also numerous fragments of pottery. The Peabody Museum of Cambridge, Mass., owns twenty gold ornaments from the Chincha Islands, off the coast of Peru. They consist of very thin plates arranged in parallelograms from seven to eight inches long by three to four inches wide, covered with dotted lines and furnished with a hole by means of which they can be hung around the neck, or fastened to the clothes. To all appearances these deposits belong to the same periods as the shell heaps. Mosiah 8:9).