This situation suggests that pots were in short supply, perhaps because they all had to be imported from the Greater Antilles. Whatever the reason, the pots and griddles were used so much that the clay was cooked completely through until they lost their elastic properties and crumbled. The site is notable for its unusual collection of animal bones, especially green sea turtles, which occur nowhere else in the region in such abundance. In addition to large quantities of turtle bones, we recovered the bones of iguanas, snakes, birds, and large fishes. The most common bird in the sample was the red-footed booby, a bush nesting species that is commonly extirpated when humans arrive in their territory.
Today there is only one nesting colony of red-footed boobies in all of the Bahamas.
A surprising discovery was how many of the fishes were very large, including one 45 lb barracuda, many 10-20 lb groupers, snappers and rainbow parrotfishes, and some sharks. In this regard Coralie differs from later sites. Porgies, surgeonfish and mojarras are regularly found at late sites, but are barely represented at Coralie despite schools of mojarras in the shallows of North Creek adjacent to the site. Finally, the abundance of herring-size fishes found in other West Indian sites were absent from the Coralie samples. In sum, the faunal remains are substantially different from those at later sites, and reflect the richer diet available to those who are the first to settle a new area.