chobee, the Everglades, and the limestone flats around present-day Miami,
but their home bases, sites of their major and minor towns, were Marco
Island, Pine Island and Sound, and Charlotte Harbor’s shores. Here they
engaged in intensive seasonal fishing, digging oysters and catching finfish
(principally mullet) with nets made of palm fiber, with well-formed shell
floats and sinkers. When not taking fishes, the Calusas hunted deer and
other animals on the big islands and the mainland, and they gathered a
large variety of fruits. For bread they relied on people who protected and
encouraged a root plant by Okeechobee. The roots were dug, dried, and
baked, and the Calusas took them as tribute or in trade. Calusa towns were
utterly engineered landscapes facing water. There were elaborate defensive
fortifications of shells, canals and artificial lagoons, sea walls and jetties,
and handsome temples and housing, especially for their principal chief
and aristocracy. Craftsmen’s work—not only ingenious fishnet floats and
sinkers and other tools—ascended to what must be called art. They cre-
ated ornamentation to be worn, masks representing birds and animals, and
wood carvings that some critics compare with those of ancient Egypt.
Calusa power was based first on their great numbers. In , when
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (founder of faraway St. Augustine) visited, ,
natives attended a fete in his honor. Archaeologists believe that no fewer
than , natives lived along Florida’s southwestern coast about this
time. By contrast, scholars estimate the population of the Ortona capital
at to , and even as late as the time of Menéndez’s appearance on
the coast, there were probably only about ,-odd fishers, hunters, and
breadmakers by the shores of Okeechobee.
The Calusas exercised power through management and distribution of
resources, which must have become scarcer in time as human population
expanded. Chiefs and religious leaders governed, in effect, the seasonal
fisheries, hunting, and plant gathering, and they controlled trade with other
peoples for additional needs. We know more of the Calusa economy than
of most others because of the seventeen-year captivity of Hernando Fonta-
neda, a Spaniard who was shipwrecked and captured in the Keys in ,
then repatriated during Menéndez’s visit. Fontaneda’s account of his long
experience with the Calusas includes detail on their cosmology’s ritual con-
nection to their most abundant and favored finfish. Each fall, mullet leave
the coastal estuaries and return to the Gulf to breed. To assure their re-
turn, the Calusas conducted a gruesome ceremony centered on a human
sacrifice. The victim—typically a nonrelated native or European captive—