As early as 800 AD, perhaps even earlier, native people settled along the river shoreline of Snead Island at the temple mound complex. Archaeological investigations, including remains of a prehistoric shelter found here, provide clues to these early inhabitants. Animal bone and shell fragments show that they lived well by harvesting fish and shellfish from surrounding waters, hunting deer, turtles, and other animals, and collecting plants in the interior hammocks. Knowledge of lifeways in complex villages like this is limited to sketches by Spanish and French explorers, and the only pictures of native Floridians are of the extinct Timucua, who lived far from here and were drawn by a French artist after his visit to northeast Florida in 1562. After contact with European explorers in the 16th century, the cultural lifeways of Florida Amerindians were beset by increased disease, warfare, and enslavement, and historical research indicates that these peoples all but vanished by the mid 1700s during a transition that brought American Indians from Georgia and eastern Alabama into Florida.