Tequesta - Housing, Clothing and Tools

Housing, Clothing and Tools

Briton Hammon reported that the Tequesta lived in hutts. No other description is available of Tequesta housing. Other tribes in southern Florida lived in houses with wooden posts, raised floors, and roofs thatched with palmetto leaves, something like the chickees of the Seminoles. These houses may have had temporary walls of plaited palmetto-leaf mats to break the wind or block the sun.

Clothing was minimal. The men wore a sort of loincloth made from deer hide, while the women wore skirts of Spanish moss or plant fibers hanging from a belt.

The Tequesta had ocean-going canoes, nets, spears, atlatls, bows and arrows (although they may have acquired those after European contact) and utilitarian pottery with little or no decoration.