About 1,000 years ago, agricultural communities were established in what would become the Southeastern and Midwestern United States, and the Mississippian culture flourished.
Keith Ashley is an archaeologist and research coordinator at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. Ashley’s research is demonstrating a link between Native Floridians and the thriving Mississippian culture.
Ashley and his research are featured in the latest episode of the television series “Florida Frontiers,” airing this month on PBS affiliates throughout the state. The program is also available online at myfloridahistory.org.
“Mississippian World is a term that we’ve kind of superimposed as archaeologists,” says Ashley. “Basically these were Chieftain level groups, meaning that they had institutionalized inequality. They had chiefs who controlled more than one village. They were involved in intensive maize agriculture. They were involved in these far flung trade and exchange networks, and they had these large mound complexes with platform mounds that probably were the platforms for chiefly residence.”
On maps of the Mississippian World, peninsular Florida is excluded. New archaeological evidence uncovered by Ashley demonstrates that Native Americans living in Northeast Florida were part of an extensive trade network that extended to present day St. Louis.
“The Mississippian World’s delineating groups were intensive maize agriculturalists, and the groups here weren’t,” says Ashley. “But they were clearly involved in interaction networks and trade with them.”
In addition to growing maize, or corn, the Mississippian cultures were known for their construction of platform mounds, on which they would build houses, towns, temples, and burial buildings. The largest chiefdom of the Mississippian World was at a ceremonial complex at Cahokia, located near present day Collinsville, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri.
“Cahokia probably sprang up about 1000 AD, and then by about 1250 it’s in decline and by 1300 it’s gone,” says Ashley. “In its wake, what you see are a lot of other rival chiefdoms that sprout up. You see these chiefdoms rise and fall throughout the area. Sometimes they group together, other times they just break down, so it’s a really dynamic landscape.”
Ashley says that the St. Johns culture of Northeast Florida roughly coincides with the Mississippian World. The St. Johns Period begins about 500 AD, and continues until European contact, 1,000 years later.
“They’re fishers, collectors, hunters,” says Ashley. “The people in Northeastern Florida really gravitate to the Mississippian interaction network and become part of it. I think they have a resource that people in the landlocked areas of Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri want, and that’s shell.”
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Clarence B. Moore documented significant archaeological sites in Florida. Moore did much of his work in the Jacksonville area, excavating the Grant Mound and the Shields Mound, where he uncovered some intriguing artifacts. Some of the artifacts were made with copper, mica, galena, and other minerals common in the Mississippian World, but not Florida.
Ashley believes that these artifacts, including a pair of copper ear decorations found by Moore at the Grant Mound, help to prove contact between Florida natives and other Native Americans who were very distant geographically.
“These small little ear pieces maybe a couple of inches in size, look like a face,” says Ashley. “They would have had a long nose pultruding from them. So far, we’ve only found seven complete pairs of those in copper in the entire United States, and all of them, we believe, are manufactured at Cahokia.”
Ashley has expanded on the information gathered by Moore, discovering distinctive pottery and other artifacts that further support the idea of Native Floridians interacting with distant neighbors to the north.
“We found a small little point called a Cahokia Point near Shields Mound,” Ashley says. “We had archaeologists from Cahokia look at it, and they told us that, yes, this is a Cahokia point, and it looked like any point that they would find at Cahokia.”
In between the St. Johns culture Indians and the Mississippian Indians, was a pocket of hunter gatherers who also had contact with Northeast Florida residents about 1,000 years ago.
Chemical analysis of distinctive pottery found near Jacksonville shows that some comes from central Georgia, while the design was also adopted by Native Floridians.
When Juan Ponce de León sailed into the mouth of the Miami River in 1513, he encountered a large Tequesta Indian village.
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés attempted to convert the Tequesta to Christianity, establishing a short lived mission at the village in 1567. Another failed mission was established there in 1743. The Spanish could not persuade the Tequesta to abandon their ancient belief system.
The native people of Florida were almost completely wiped out by unfamiliar diseases brought by the Europeans.
“With weakened tribes, the Spanish borders of Florida were fully breached by the English who instigated Creek raids as far south as Key West, enslaving thousands of Indians for the plantations of the Carolinas and Georgia,” says archaeologist Robert S. Carr. “By 1763, when the Spanish ceded Florida to England, the Tequesta and the Keys Indians had migrated to Cuba and become extinct as a culture. The last of the Tequesta moved to villages outside of Havana.”
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the banks at the mouth of the Miami River were found to be covered with remnants of the Tequesta culture, including extensive shell middens, black earth middens, and at least four burial mounds.
In the 1940s, archaeologist John M. Goggin gave the name “Glades culture” to the archeological remains found in Dade County. In the 1970s, the Granada site was excavated on one side of the mouth of the Miami River, uncovering evidence of year-round habitation by the Tequesta Indians and their ancestors.
Today, the only Tequesta site at the mouth of the Miami River that has not been destroyed by development is the Miami Circle located at Brickell Point, across from the Granada site.
In 1998, Robert S. Carr was conducting a routine salvage excavation of the Brickell Point site in advance of the construction of two high rise apartment buildings. Other apartment buildings from 1950 were torn down to make room for the new construction. Carr and his team uncovered Glades culture artifacts of shell, stone, bone, and pottery.
In January 1999, the announced discovery of the Miami Circle sparked imaginations around the world.
At the Brickell Point site, archaeologists uncovered a circle, about 28 feet across, defined by a series of postholes carved into the limestone bedrock. Carr said that the Miami Circle “may be of national significance as it is believed to be the only cut-in-rock prehistoric structural footprint ever found in eastern North America.”
Public speculation about what structure had been built on top of the Miami Circle was rampant, ranging from a Tequesta Indian Council House to an astronomical observatory constructed by transplanted Mayan people.
While there were undoubtedly prehistoric artifacts discovered at the Brickell Point site, not everyone is convinced that the Miami Circle was one of them.
“They don’t like me a lot in Miami,” says archaeologist Jerald T. Milanich, author of the book Handfuls of History: Stories about Florida’s Past.
When Milanich first saw the Miami Circle, he was surprised that a rectangular septic tank was inside of it.
“I think at that point, the research question should have been, how did that septic tank get there?” says Milanich. “Did it go with the apartments that were built in the 1940s? Did it go with one of the earlier Brickell houses that were there? Was there perhaps, a circular structure of some kind built over that septic tank?”
Milanich found an early twentieth century postcard of Brickell Point that shows a round structure that may be over the septic tank.
“I think what needs to be done still, to this day, is more research there, to try to answer the question of when that septic tank was put in, and what it was attached to,” says Milanich. “Clearly, that’s not a very popular idea, especially to people in Miami who worked so hard to get the government to buy the land and preserve the site.”
The Miami Circle is now protected as public land.
“All that’s left of this huge, complex archaeological site is that little bit that’s now preserved in the Miami Circle park area,” says Milanich. “I think that’s a good thing for the public, and certainly for our understanding of the past.”
Brevard County is home to an impressive list of important archaeological excavations including a unique prehistoric pond cemetery, numerous Indian mounds, paleontological sites, colonial era shipwrecks, and pioneer homesteads.
Since 1953, members of the Indian River Anthropological Society have been participating in the discovery, excavation, and recording of archaeological sites in Brevard County.
“Operating primarily in Brevard County, we have, over the years, also provided services in Volusia, Seminole, Orange, Osceola, and Indian River Counties,” says Bob Gross of the Indian River Anthropological Society. “IRAS provides, at no cost to the Brevard County government and its municipalities, many tasks required by statute under the provisions of the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, as amended, and as directed by local statute and Brevard’s Comprehensive Plan to the Brevard County Historical Commission.”
The Indian River Anthropological Society has been a chapter of the statewide Florida Anthropological Society since 1956.
At the FAS Annual Meeting on Saturday, May 6, in Jacksonville, IRAS was presented with the Arthur R. Lee FAS Chapter Award for outstanding outreach, education, and site stewardship.
“Members of the IRAS were gratified to learn that their years of devotion to the study of Florida’s, and particularly Brevard County’s anthropological and archaeological resources through investigation, documentation, preservation, and education has been recognized at the highest levels,” Gross says.
Thirty-five years ago, one of the most significant archaeological discoveries in the world was made in Brevard County. During construction of the Windover Farms subdivision in Titusville, an ancient pond cemetery was discovered. The site contained 168 intact human burials, carefully positioned and wrapped in the oldest woven cloth found in North America.
The human remains uncovered at the Windover site were between 7,000 and 8,000 years old, making them 3,200 years older than King Tutankhamen and 2,000 years older than the Great Pyramids of Egypt.
The anaerobic environment and ph balance of the pond allowed for remarkable preservation of the remains. Ninety-one of the skulls contained intact brain matter.
Members of the Indian River Anthropological Society participated as volunteers at the Windover Dig. Vera Zimmerman of IRAS wrote identification numbers on bone fragments, and conducted tours of the site for the public.
“I was just extremely lucky to be living here when that find was made, because it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to work on a dig like that,” Zimmerman says. “We had people coming in from all over the world. They had a conference here. It was just outstanding. It told them things that they didn’t know about the Archaic Period. They still believed before that people were living a pretty nomadic lifestyle, following game. The Windover Dig showed they were living a fairly settled village life.”
The origins of IRAS go back to 1951, when sixteen Spanish silver coins were found on Playalinda Beach. Local archaeologist E.Y. “Dick” Guernsey was consulted, and a group of interested residents were inspired to form an archaeology club. The members were mostly newcomers to the area, brought here by the recently constructed Patrick Air Force Base and the long range missile proving ground at Cape Canaveral.
As construction rapidly increased in Brevard County to accommodate the population explosion accompanying the burgeoning space program, a growing number of Indian mounds and other historic sites were being uncovered.
By 1953, the Indian River Anthropological Society was meeting monthly under the direction of Dr. Guernsey. He led the group to become a chapter of the Florida Anthropological Society, as described on the front page of the Melbourne Times on April 10, 1956:
“A chapter of the Florida Anthropological Society has been organized in Brevard County, and persons interested in digging up bones and other objects of the long dead past may soon be invited to join…They are planning to map part of the east Coast and locate ancient Indian mounds which will be explored in a scientific manner.”
The award-winning Indian River Anthropological Society continues its work today.
About 1,000 years ago, agricultural communities were established in what would become the Southeastern and Midwestern United States, and what is called the Mississippian culture flourished.
Keith Ashley is an archaeologist and research coordinator at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville. Ashley’s research is demonstrating a link between Native Floridians and the thriving Mississippian culture.
“Mississippian World is a term that we’ve kind of superimposed as archaeologists,” says Ashley. “Basically these were Chieftain level groups, meaning that they had institutionalized inequality. They had chiefs who controlled more than one village. They were involved in intensive maize agriculture. They were involved in these far flung trade and exchange networks, and they had these large mound complexes with platform mounds that probably were the platforms for chiefly residence.”
On maps of the Mississippian World, peninsular Florida is excluded. New archaeological evidence uncovered by Ashley demonstrates that Native Americans living in Northeast Florida were part of an extensive trade network that extended to present day St. Louis.
“The Mississippian World’s delineating groups were intensive maize agriculturalists, and the groups here weren’t,” says Ashley. “But they were clearly involved in interaction networks and trade with them.”
In addition to growing maize, or corn, the Mississippian cultures were known for their construction of platform mounds, on which they would build houses, towns, temples, and burial buildings. The largest chiefdom of the Mississippian World was at a ceremonial complex at Cahokia, located near present day Collinsville, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, Missouri.
“Cahokia probably sprang up about 1000 AD, and then by about 1250 it’s in decline and by 1300 it’s gone,” says Ashley. “In its wake, what you see are a lot of other rival chiefdoms that sprout up. You see these chiefdoms rise and fall throughout the area. Sometimes they group together, other times they just break down, so it’s a really dynamic landscape.”
Ashley says that the St. Johns culture of Northeast Florida roughly coincides with the Mississippian World. The St. Johns Period begins about 500 AD, and continues until European contact, 1,000 years later.
“They’re fishers, collectors, hunters,” says Ashley. “The people in Northeastern Florida really gravitate to the Mississippian interaction network and become part of it. I think they have a resource that people in the landlocked areas of Alabama, Georgia, and Missouri want, and that’s shell.”
In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Clarence B. Moore documented some significant archaeological sites in Florida. Moore did much of his work in the Jacksonville area, excavating the Grant Mound and the Shields Mound, where he uncovered some spectacular artifacts. Some of the artifacts were made with copper, mica, galena, and other minerals common in the Mississippian World, but not Florida.
Ashley believes that these artifacts, including a pair of copper ear decorations found by Moore at the Grant Mound, help to prove contact between Florida natives and other Native Americans who were very distant geographically.
“These small little ear pieces maybe a couple of inches in size, look like a face,” says Ashley. “They would have had a long nose pultruding from them. So far, we’ve only found seven complete pairs of those in copper in the entire United States, and all of them, we believe, are manufactured at Cahokia.”
Ashley has expanded on the information gathered by Moore in Jacksonville, discovering distinctive pottery and other artifacts that further support the idea of Native Floridians interacting with distant neighbors to the north.
“We found a small little point called a Cahokia Point near Shields Mound,” Ashley says. “We had archaeologists from Cahokia look at it, and they told us that, yes, this is a Cahokia point, and it looked like any point that they would find at Cahokia.”
In between the St. Johns culture Indians and the Mississippian Indians, was a pocket of hunter gatherers who also had contact with Northeast Florida residents about 1,000 years ago.
Chemical analysis of distinctive pottery found near Jacksonville shows that some comes from central Georgia, while the design was also used adopted by Native Floridians.
“Maybe female potters, who learn how to make Okmulgee pottery, marry into St. Johns communities in Jacksonville, and they bring their native pottery technology with them.”
Historical Archaeologist Kathleen Deagan led a series of excavations that identified the original encampment of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés from 1565.
From that encampment, the city of St. Augustine was established as the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in what is now the United States.
“We began that project in the 1970s, thinking we were going to be studying an Indian village,” says Deagan, Distinguished Research Curator and Professor Emerita from the University of Florida.
“Over the years as our sample became larger, we realized ‘wait a minute. This isn’t like anything we’ve ever seen in a Native American town.’ Square buildings made with nails. We found a barrel well made of white Spanish oak filled with mid-16th century Spanish artifacts. We realized that this must be the Menéndez encampment.”
For more than 40 years, Deagan led annual excavations in St. Augustine, in what is now the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park, and at the adjacent Mission Nombre de Dios.
Identifying the starting point of America’s oldest continuously occupied city would seem to be the crowning achievement of any archaeologist’s career. It is not her four decades of work in the heart of St. Augustine, though, that Deagan identifies as her most significant accomplishment.
Deagan believes that her most important work was the excavation of Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mosé, better known as Fort Mose.
Established in 1738 by Manuel Montiano, Governor of Spanish Colonial Florida, Fort Mose was the first free black settlement to be legally established in what would become the United States. The community was located just north of St. Augustine.
“I first learned about Fort Mose when I was a student at the University of Florida in the early 1970s,” Deagan says. “One of my professors, Charles Fairbanks, was very interested in learning more about Fort Mose, and I was a student on one of the digs he brought over here to St. Augustine to try and locate it.”
Deagan built on the work of Fairbanks, leading her own excavations at the Fort Mose site in the mid-1980s. She was able to conclusively identify the location of the fort on an island in the middle of a wet, marshy area.
“For archaeologists it was a matter of putting on your high boots, and slogging through the mud,” says Deagan. “Once you’re on the actual site itself, which is a small marsh island, its high ground. We learned that the site actually has been occupied by people for hundreds and hundreds of years. There was a prehistoric Timucua Indian site there, and then very briefly there was an Apalachee Mission after 1704, and then Fort Mose. Once you’re on the site its normal excavation, digging through shell and dirt and tree roots.”
Deagan and her team uncovered the moat that surrounded the architectural structure of Fort Mose. They then discovered key artifacts associated with soldiers including uniform buttons, tobacco pipes, and lots of rum bottles. They also found items associated with family life in the community, such as thimbles, pins, and pottery for cooking and eating.
The population of the community at Fort Mose consisted primarily of former slaves who had escaped from British colonies to the north into Spanish controlled Florida. The Spanish government encouraged this immigration of British slaves by granting them freedom in exchange for their conversion to Catholicism and a pledge to defend St. Augustine from British invasion.
The community of Fort Mose was short lived. When the British took control of Florida from Spain in 1763, Fort Mose was abandoned.
“All of the people of Mose went to Cuba,” says Deagan. “The records of their lives have been uncovered in Cuba by Jane Landers, who is learning their fate. There might even be some descendants today.”
The archaeology at Fort Mose has expanded our understanding of history.
More than a century after prehistoric human remains were discovered among the bones of extinct animals in Vero Beach, new archaeological discoveries are being made in the same location.
The site’s lead archaeologist, Andy Hemmings, will give a presentation called “The Old Vero Site: Recent Work and its Place on the Paleoindian Landscape of Florida,” Saturday, March 19, at 3:00 pm, at the Library of Florida History in Cocoa.
When a large drainage ditch was dug in Vero in 1913, the bones of prehistoric animals such as mammoth, mastodon, extinct horses, and giant armadillo were discovered. Two years later, as naturalist Frank Ayers walked along the banks of the canal, he noticed what appeared to be a human skull protruding from the dirt.
Ayers quickly went to get his friend Isaac Weills, and the two men carefully uncovered the skull and additional human bones. The human bones were mixed in with animal bones that neither man could identify. The bones were discovered within undisturbed stratifications of earth, a black layer over a brown layer.
“That piqued the curiosity of the state geologist, Elias Sellards, who came down with his assistant, Herman Gunter, and basically went to work,” says Hemmings. “In 1916, early in April, they found some (human) bones themselves, with the extinct animals. The extinct animal list continued to grow, and it really started to get the interest of the whole scientific community. So, then the critics start showing up.”
With the discipline of archaeology in its infancy, geologists and anthropologists from Yale University, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, the Carnegie Institution, and the Smithsonian all showed up to offer their opinions.
The geologists, led by Sellards, believed that the human bones discovered at the Vero site were from the same Pleistocene period as the extinct animal bones that they had been found with. That meant that humans were here during the Ice Age, at least 11,000 years ago.
The anthropologists, led by Ales Hrdlička, clung to the prevailing belief of the early twentieth century, that humans did not occupy North America until just 4,000 years ago. They disregarded the geological evidence and relied instead on skull measurements to reach their conclusions. Skull measurements are no longer considered a reliable method of determining the age of bones.
Without modern carbon dating techniques available to them, the scientists were unable to reach a consensus, and the controversy over the true age of what had been named the Vero Man remained unresolved.
“We have reasons to believe that this really is a Paleoindian site, that we have some evidence of human occupation between eleven and fourteen thousand years ago, much like Sellards suggested initially,” says Hemmings. “Whatever the earliest human occupation of the site is, whatever kinds of activities we can demonstrate that they were engaged in while on site, we want to talk about that. Whatever it is, we just want to get it right. We want to end that controversy.”
Discoveries of Clovis points and other tools near the Vero Man Site have proven that people did inhabit Florida at least 13,000 years ago. Hemmings believes that new discoveries at the Vero Man Site could eventually prove even earlier human habitation.
Unfortunately, the original Vero Man bones cannot be tested using modern dating techniques, because they have been misplaced over the past century.
“Material from this site is housed in at least twenty-two institutions around the world that I know of” says Hemmings. “The human remains went back and forth between here, the Florida Geologic Survey, the Smithsonian Institution, and maybe some other places. We think we will eventually turn them up. We don’t think they’re gone, just hidden, filed away.”
Even more controversy emerged from the original excavations at the Old Vero Man Site. It was determined that the Vero Man skeletal remains were actually those of a four foot nine inch tall woman. The bones identified as “skeleton 2 and 3” turned out to be bones from one individual, also a woman. So, while there are two Vero Women, there is no man from the Vero Man Site.
“I think it’s probably safer at this point to just say the Old Vero Site, man,” says Hemmings.
