It seems from these circumstances that the needs of aboriginal residence would have been served by a site under the lee of the Kolch hill, between Duane and Leonard streets, on the sloping ground between Broadway and Lafayette street. It is through this area that the grading of Pearl street west of Park Row cut between the two ponds and disclosed the shell-beds that marked a village-site.

We may from this comparative study come to the interesting conclusion that the chief place of native residence on lower Manhattan was close to the present center of municipal government of the great metropolis, which has become its overwhelming successor.

The exhaustive explorations by the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, of complete village-sites in the Borough of the Bronx, have informed us of

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INDIAN PATHS

the arrangement and approximate extent of these village communities. The lodges seem to have been ranged in rather irregular rows, generally facing to the south, each with its fire-pit within and its rubbish-pit outside the entrance. The center of the group might have had a large community fire- pit, kept constantly supplied with fuel, around which the gatherings of the clans took place.

The extent of the population probably depended more on the facilities for food supply than on the convenience or spaciousness of the village-site. The restricted hunting area and the rather limited cultivable lands in its vicinity would indicate that Werpoes probably comprised fewer lodges than Snakapins, on Clasons point, in which more than sixty pits discovered may be taken to have marked the sites of some forty lodges, housing a population which may be assumed to have been about three hundred. As the needs of a group of even half that number involved considerable cultivation of cereals, we may assume that any suitable ground nearby would