The Pompano Beach Indian Mound is a prehistoric sand burial mound used by the Tequesta tribe and their ancestors to bury their dead. A nearby village and midden dated as far back as AD 500, and artifacts from the site belong to the Glades pre-Columbian cultural period, about AD 500 to 1513, with evidence of occupation as late as 1763. The Tequesta shaped and controlled other tribes within the Everglades, built extensive canal systems, and were skilled woodworkers who made dugout canoes. They gathered fruits, hunted wildlife and fish, and sometimes traveled great distances by canoe in search of large marine animals such as sharks and right whales. Their villages were typically marked by kitchen middens containing discarded shellfish, bones, ashes, and broken pottery, usually accessible by water near a river mouth or on an island. Spanish accounts from the sixteenth century identified the Tequesta as a powerful Florida tribe whose main village stood along the shore of Biscayne Bay near the mouth of the Miami River in Miami-Dade County. They were among the first indigenous groups encountered by Juan Ponce de Leon on his first voyage to Florida in 1513. In the 1560s, the Spanish established a fort and mission among the Tequesta and took the brother of the principal Tequesta chief to Spain; after returning to Florida, he helped mediate relations between the Spanish and Indians. Archaeological excavations at Pompano Beach have produced pottery, ceramics, carved bone, shell and wood tools, and human remains. In 1926, the City of Pompano Beach created a park to protect the mound and its contents, and the mound was later placed on the Pompano Beach Local Register of Historic Places in 2010 and the National Register of Historic Places in 2014.