Rich Archaeological Site Gives UF Scientists New Clues About Early Man

November 7, 1996

GAINESVILLE — A 10,000-year-old underwater time capsule is giving University of Florida scientists new clues about the first people to survive the tumultuous transition from the Ice Age to today’s modern climate.

The site in the Florida Panhandle’s Aucilla River may be the richest archaeological find for its time. The area, once a center of concentrated human activity, was sealed and preserved by a prehistoric onslaught of flood waters, said Brinnen Carter, a UF archaeologist and member of the excavation team.

“These people who lived during this period had to adjust to drastic differences in climate, animals and plant life,” Carter said. “Populations had to move, find new sources of food and water and make new living arrangements to adapt to the far-reaching environmental changes.

“Not only were these the earliest people to see modern climates, but they were the first not to rely heavily on mammoths and mastodons. Essentially, they were the first humans that weren’t big game hunters. Perhaps that is why they appear to be more settled down.”

The excavation team’s finding that these people lived in concentrated numbers lends one more piece to a growing body of evidence that humans of the early Archaic Period were less nomadic than their hunting predecessors, he said.

Stone projectile points, fire-cracked rock, bone tools and wood fragments collected from the site, named Page/Ladson for the discoverer and landowner, show that Indians lived and worked in the area, probably in relatively small bands, Carter said.

What distinguishes this archaeological deposit from many others is the quantity and quality of artifacts, and that they can be dated to a relatively brief period of time, he said.

“The worked wood is especially noteworthy,” said team member Mark Muniz, a UF anthropology researcher. “There has never been such a collection of worked wood dating so early. Many pieces are pointed like tent stakes and one very large piece of cypress was hollowed out like one end of a canoe.”

Excavating the site are paleontologists and archaeologists from the Florida Museum of Natural History at UF, led by David Webb, with funds from the Florida Department of State and the National Geographic Society.

Before temperatures warmed, causing the polar ice caps to melt and sea levels to rise rapidly, Florida’s landscape was much drier, resembling the savannahs of modern-day Africa. Lower sea levels made the peninsula nearly twice its present size. The site under study was nearly 100 miles from the coastline 10,000 years ago, compared to five miles from the Gulf of Mexico today.

Scientists believe a flood caused the prehistoric settlement’s demise because the artifacts were found submerged and encased in clay, where they lay undisturbed for 10,000 years, Carter said. Radiocarbon dates confine the camp’s existence to a few generations, unlike most other camps, which are usually reoccupied over thousands of years, he said.

“Having such a short time period gives us the rare opportunity to reconstruct how a specific group of Paleo-Indians in time were living and what they were manufacturing,” Muniz said. “And this is such an extraordinarily rich accumulation that it feels as if we’re excavating right on their front porch.”

Among the objects the UF team found that reveal information about the inhabitants’ lifestyle are an intact hearth, which was probably used for cooking, given the presence of roasted turtle bone, and flint modified into projectile points, bolo stones and hammerstones. “The worked flint artifacts are really important because they show industrial capability,” Carter said. “These people were not only manufacturing the tools they hunted with but also the tools they used to produce other tools.”

Until now, scientists knew early Archaic people were capable of manufacturing projectile points, but they didn’t have evidence from the places where they were made, he said.