"The Tequesta were famous as wood carvers, " Carr said, though evidence of even that is relatively scant. "Unfortunately, wood doesn't preserve very well."

It is also possible that the Tequesta appropriated the Miami Circle long after it was abandoned by even more enigmatic predecessors.

NOT LIKE ANYTHING ELSE

Responsible scientists say they are stumped, pending further investigation.

"To my knowledge, we have no evidence that the Tequesta produced anything like this anywhere else, " said Jerald Milanich of the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville and the University of Florida.

Alas, neither has anyone else produced anything like the Circle.

"We have seen nothing like this in Florida or anywhere in the southeastern United States, " Milanich said.

"What is known about the Tequesta comes almost entirely from the 1500s. The Circle supposedly dates 1,000 years earlier and is associated with the Glades culture, which we believe was associated with distant ancestors of the Tequesta.

"Rather than looking at the 16th Century Tequesta to interpret the Circle, it might be more valid to look at other [earlier] cultures in southern Florida."

GATHERING SPOT

At any rate, the site on the river's south bank clearly stood as a gathering spot for the Tequesta and a centerpiece of their culture. Archaeologists have found pottery shards, tools, human teeth and other evidence that the Tequesta occupied the site for hundreds of years.

Interestingly, evidence also suggests that the Tequesta stopped living at the site between 1200 and 1300, coalescing on the north bank of the river and reserving the south bank for ceremonial activities by the time Ponce de Leon arrived.

In the late 1500s, geographer Juan López de Velasco described their main settlement near what is now the Hyatt Regency and Dupont Plaza hotels: "At the very point of Tequesta, there enters into the sea a freshwater river, which comes from the interior, and to all appearances runs from west to east. There are many fish and eels in it. Alongside it on the north side is the Indian settlement that is called Tequesta, from which the point takes its name."

Relatively short in stature - men were about five foot eight and women were about five foot three - the Tequesta were descended from native Americans who had lived in the region for 2,000 years. The tribe settled mostly along the river and near bays and coastlines.

FISHING, HUNTING, GATHERING

Spanish documents from the 16th Century suggest that the Tequesta were expert fishermen, harvesting sea mammals, sea turtles, large volumes of shellfish and other fish. They hunted deer and raccoon with bow and arrow. They collected wild fruits, nuts and berries, but like most native people in South Florida they did not cultivate crops.

They were ruled by a chief who lived in the main settlement but also had authority over nearby villages.

This chief and his people were forced into alliances by the more powerful Calusa, a larger native group centered near present-day Fort Myers. The Calusa often demanded that the Tequesta provide young women for marriage.

Spanish explorers and missionaries showed sporadic interest in the Tequesta, and relations between the Europeans and the native people were often tense. Hostilities sometimes erupted and the Tequesta resisted most efforts to convert them to Christianity. European germs In the end, they succumbed not to European religious or commercial interests but to European germs.

Like native people throughout the Americas, the Tequesta had no resistance to smallpox, measles, influenza or even the common cold, and those diseases swept through the local population with devastating effect.

By the 1700s, the Tequesta community was so small that it was easily nudged aside or cast into slavery by marauding native groups from the north. By 1763, the Spanish carried the last 80 families of Tequesta and other natives to Havana.

A culture that thrived in South Florida for hundreds of years was gone. Precious little evidence of its existence has survived. "It just faded away, " Milanich said. "Almost all of it has bit the dust under the 20th Century.

"We may be losing our own heritage. Part of our identity as Americans is our Native America past."