Joe Capozzi‘In academia, there is the notion that nobody or very few people lived in South Florida before 2,000 years ago. We now know that is incorrect.’
Deep in the swamps off the Beeline Highway, a team of archeologists is rewriting the public’s understanding of human history in Palm Beach County.
Wading through knee-deep water to reach sites in the Loxahatchee Slough, they’re digging through layers of rock once thought impenetrable and unearthing scientific treasures older than the pyramids in Egypt.
But the ancient items being found by Palm Beach County’s Environmental Resources Management team are a lot less glamorous than the gold coins and silver pieces of eight that private underwater treasure hunters have been salvaging for decades from 17th-century shipwrecks offshore.
This trove of roughly 250,000 artifacts, nearly 20 miles inland, comes from heaps of trash discarded by prehistoric humans — from turtle shells, fish bones and shark teeth to burnt alligator scute and charcoal.
It may be as monetarily worthless as modern-day trash, but this scientifically invaluable booty is archeological proof that human beings have been calling the area west of modern-day Palm Beach Gardens home for more than 5,000 years, much longer than previously thought.
“In academia there is the notion that nobody or very few people lived in South Florida before 2,000 years ago. We now know that is incorrect,” said County Archeologist Christian Davenport.
Through the ERM team’s work over the past three years, he said, “We have pushed out time periods back to 5,000 years along the coast and nearly 4,000 years in the interior of Palm Beach County.”
The groundbreaking work is being documented in a series of short films shot by ERM videographer Caroline Skae under the direction of Benji Studt, who leads the department’s Outreach and Science Communication team.
The first video was released on ERM’s YouTube channel in May; the second and latest one dropped Aug. 21. A third is planned for next year.
The films hammer home a powerful public message: The discoveries may not have been possible without the county voters who decades ago approved bond issues to buy and preserve public lands such as the 13,000-acre Loxahatchee Slough in northwestern Palm Beach County.
“If these areas aren’t here, we can’t learn about it,’’ Davenport said, noting that “so little of” South Florida’s archaeological history was studied before Henry Flagler’s railroad ushered in an era of largely unchecked development.
“The Loxahatchee Slough really is a scientific learning bed. This place is so incredibly important,’’ he said.
“Every time we go into the field, we have a chance to find something that was previously unknown. It’s mind blowing to think about.’’
Inspiration from Park Service archeologist
Inspiration for ERM’s slough work came from a discovery made 20 years ago in the southern Everglades by Margo Schwadron, a National Park Service archaeologist.
Schwadron was working in a tree island, a small patch of elevated land surrounded by water, when she encountered a layer of what she thought was bedrock, long considered a dead end in archeological exploration.
“Archaeologists are not geologists,” Davenport said, “so when we hit rock we generally think, ‘OK, rock is far older than people, so stop digging.’ This paradigm led archaeologists for more than 60 years to interpret that nobody lived in the Everglades before 2,700 years ago.”
But Schwadron changed that thinking when she decided to try a new approach. Using a concrete saw and heavy equipment, she cut into the rock and discovered that it was actually “caprock,” a geological term for a hard, erosion-resistant layer such as limestone, sandstone or caliche.
And the caprock she cut into contained ancient artifacts 2,000 to 3,000 years older than deposits found above it, meaning that people were calling the interior swamps of the southern Everglades home for at least 5,000 years.
Cutting into rock
Years later, Davenport and his team set out to replicate Schwadron’s approach in Palm Beach County. Their initial efforts failed, but they found success this year when they were led to a layer of caprock by Loxahatchee Slough Natural Area site managers Drew Cunningham and T.J. Wilkerson.
Using a concrete saw, ERM technician Jeremy Korzeniowski and analyst Chris Trapasso cut through caprock. ERM archeologists used prybars, chisels and hammers to chip away small sections.
The backbreaking work paid off when the team found tools made from animal bones and teeth, charcoal, fiber-tempered pottery shards and other evidence of ancient human habitation.
“We dig down to what we think is bedrock. Not only is it crumbling but there are so many artifacts,” said Nydia Ponton, a county archeologist. “This is groundbreaking because it means people were using resources from the tree island much longer than we originally thought.”
Cleaning the clumps of unearthed artifacts at ERM’s Vista Center lab off Jog Road, zooarchaeologist Ashley Gibson discovered tools made from deer bones and a shark’s tooth with a hole in the middle, suggesting it was used as a knife by ancient humans.
“I keep thinking of the phrase ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.’ That’s how I feel digging through these middens,” Gibson said.
“Middens are basically piles of trash,” she said. “Sure, it might not be worth anything, but you can gain such wild insight into the past, how they were eating animals around them that they were seeing every day and were hunting.”
Ponton said she was impressed with the high concentrations of turtle shells in the find, along with fish bones and burnt gator scute, that spiky armor on a gator’s back.
“It’s almost like this was a prehistoric butcher shop or a fish house in the slough,” Studt said with a laugh.
‘The next frontier of archaeology’
The newly discovered slough site isn’t the oldest in Palm Beach County. That distinction belongs to a midden more than 5,000 years old near the Jupiter lighthouse, Davenport said.
Both sites are significant, he said, because they prove that people were living in the inland Palm Beaches as far back as the Late Archaic Period (3,000 to 500 years BC), when ancient Native Americans transitioned from highly nomadic hunting groups to living in permanent settlements.
Trade networks connecting north and south Florida were established and strengthened, with rivers and sloughs acting as ancient highways.
“There is little doubt in my mind that the people of the slough were indeed interacting with people in both the Everglades proper as well as people up in Martin County,” Davenport said.
The slough work could soon raise the question of whether public agencies should require another layer in the historical review process on development applications.
“Archaeologists likely missed a lot of sites because we did not try to break through what we thought was bedrock,” Davenport said. “Moving forward, this means archaeologists are going to need to account for this during construction projects.”
Meanwhile, county archaeologists are continuing their work in the slough, eager to unearth the next big find that could change what we know about the area’s history.
“The next frontier of archaeology is the work you guys are doing in the slough,’’ Studt said to Davenport the other day.
“It’s almost like we have only been reading the first chapter of the Everglades, and now we get to unlock the rest.”
See ERM’s first video here
See ERM’s second video here
