Indigenous Peoples: the Ais in Sebastian, Florida

The Ais were the people who lived along the Indian River Lagoon at Sebastian when the Spanish arrived, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service dates their presence at Pelican Island from 2000 BCE to the mid-1600s.

The Service says Pelican Island and the surrounding area were first inhabited by the Ais people between 2000 BCE and the mid-1600s. The St. Lucie Historical Society gives their range as the coast between Cape Canaveral in the north and Fort Pierce in the south, reaching west to the St. Johns River, which puts the Sebastian River mouth and the inlet near the middle of Ais country.

Spanish writers used the people's name for the water itself. The Roseland marker of the Florida Division of Historical Resources says the Ays lived along the confluence of the St. Sebastian River and the Indian River, called the Rio d'ays, when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. The National Park Service records the same name, Rio d' Ais, for the Indian River and notes that the line between Ais and Timucuan country to the north is still unclear.

The Ais did not farm. The historical society describes hunter-gatherers whose diet was rich in fish, turtle and shellfish, with cocoplums, sabal palm berries and other gathered fruit. The lagoon at Sebastian, with its oyster bars and grass flats, supplied most of that.

Around Sebastian Inlet the Ais left shell middens, sand mounds, burials and pottery, evidence that Florida State Parks dates to as early as 2000 B.C.

Florida State Parks reports that evidence suggests people have lived in the Sebastian Inlet area since 2000 B.C. Pottery found there carries markings and materials similar to the Glades culture to the south and the St. Johns culture to the north, which the park reads as a zone of contact between coastal groups. Shell middens, the heaped debris of meals, run the length of the barrier island, and sand mounds and human burial remains suggest ceremonial and religious practice.

The 2013 Pentoya marker gives a sense of how long the pottery sequence runs on the Indian River. At that Ais town site to the north, it says, artifacts date from as early as 2000 BC to as late as AD 1700, from fiber-tempered Orange pottery to more recent Malabar II check-stamped ware. The same styles turn up along the lagoon at Sebastian.

Much of the shell is gone. The Eau Gallie marker notes that the mounds at the winter town of Pentoaya were largely removed early in the 20th century, when their shell was used as roadbed material, a fate shared by many Indian River Lagoon middens.

The newer state marker says yes: a 2013 Florida Division of Historical Resources marker places the Ais paramount village at the Kroegel homestead just south of Sebastian, while an older 2003 marker put the principal town near Vero Beach.

The Pentoya marker in Melbourne, placed in 2013, states that the main settlement of the Ais, their paramount village, was located at the Kroegel homestead just south of the city of Sebastian in Indian River County. The Eau Gallie marker from 2003 describes Alvaro Mexia's 1605 trip down the coast to the principal Ais town near present-day Vero Beach. The two markers record a shift in where historians place the town over a decade, and the Sebastian location is the more recent state reading.

The Kroegel homestead held the largest landmark of that era. Indian River County describes it as including a large prehistoric shell mound, or midden, known as Barker's Bluff, on the west bank of the Indian River. Indian River County Historian Ruth Stanbridge, in a Pelican Island Conservation Society reprint, calls it one of the largest shell mounds along the Indian River and a landmark for river travelers for centuries, and quotes Frieda Kroegel Thompson's description of it as 1,000 feet long and 400 feet wide.

The county keeps part of that ground as the Rodney Kroegel Conservation Area on Indian River Drive. It lists the 2.6 acre site as not open to the public.

The dated points below come from federal, state and county historical sources for the Indian River Lagoon around Sebastian, from first settlement to the end of the Ais as a people.

Spanish records portray the Ais of the Sebastian coast as a large chiefdom that Spain courted as an ally, with a chief reported in 1597 to command more people than any other Florida leader the governor had met.

The St. Lucie Historical Society names Oathaqua as a major Ais chief around 1563 and cites Governor Mendez de Canco's 1597 report that the Ais chief had more Indians under him than any other tribe he had contact with. It also states that the Ais were friendly with the Spanish and sent warriors in 1605 to help them against the French. The society notes that the Ais both took in and turned on shipwrecked sailors, a reminder that the coast from Sebastian Inlet south was dangerous ground for crews from wrecked ships.

The Spanish mapped Ais towns as well. The Pentoya marker says Pentoaya was one of ten towns recorded on Alvaro Mexia's 1605 map of Indian habitation sites along the lagoon. The Spanish treasure fleet that wrecked off the barrier island in 1715 arrived after the Ais had already been absorbed into other groups; that era is covered on the Spanish colonial page.

The Ais of the Sebastian coast shrank to 137 people by 1711 and disappeared as a separate people by the mid-1740s, chiefly from diseases brought by Europeans.

The St. Lucie Historical Society says that after 1703 the tribe was absorbed into the Costas, that their numbers had diminished to 137 individuals by 1711, and that European diseases eradicated the remaining Ais and Costas by the mid-1740s. The Service's end date of the mid-1600s for Ais presence at Pelican Island is earlier, and the two sources describe different places and measures: one island versus the whole people.

What survives near Sebastian is physical. The Sebastian Area Historical Society says the Ais left behind shells and pottery that were found and donated, and its museum on Main Street displays Ais relics alongside shipwreck artifacts and Pelican Island history. Florida State Parks interprets the area's prehistory at the McLarty Treasure Museum at Sebastian Inlet State Park, on the barrier island where the middens run.