Indian Burials thoughout history.

[Cappy Z.]

Kind of a intellectual inquiry if you will. I have no plans to dig up any mounds etc. My question is since Florida has been occupied by Indians for thousands of years..shouldn't there be many many burial grounds? Only a few make the news.
The other question I have is about depth. A few years ago in Daytona Beach Florida apparently workmen were repairing a water pipe at "twenty feet" deep in the sand..and found an Indian.
Is it possible that many burial grounds have the remains as deep as twenty feet?

Just an interesting subject.

 

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[centfladigger]

most of the burials here in Florida were water burials. In the archaic times they bundeled the dead and staked them to the bottom of the lakes and ponds. The windover site is the most famous one so far. Near Titusville. 8,000 year old burials...... Workers digging an old peat pond to make way for an exit ramp for I-95 disovered bones in the peat and called the cops, cops called the archs and they set up a drainage sytem and found over 100 burial so far, alot more since then, anyways the awesome thing about this site is the preservations of tissue. The peat allowed no oxygen and they found brains in alot of the skulls. They found fabric made from palmetto fibers, 26 strands to the sq.inch. This site is preserved and burials still undiscovered awaiting better technology in the future. Okeechobee had numerous burials exposed in the drought 2 years ago. I know of 3 lakes right now that have them. Our mounds came from the woodland period the safety harbor/weedon island culture/swift creek etc.

http://www.nbbd.com/godo/history/windover/

Most of our mounds have long since been destroyed by development or out of atate Archs and the goodies taken to out of state museums or even overseas museums. We have some of the best wet site archeaology anywhere. The Marco Island sight found by Frank Cushings( I think it was him) in the turn of the century unearthed wooden mask and wooden objects, paddles figurines stools , bowls etc. The masks had paint still on them, but when they were exposed to the air the quickly deteriorated. Check out wet site archeaology by Barbera Purdy.

C.B Moore was the main arch to destroy the state. He had a steam boat called the Gopher and took it up most of the rivers and dug the mess out of alot of mounds, he kept excellent records and his books are a must have for alot of Florida collectors. Copper, gold, mica and other fine materials have all been found in our mounds.Shell death masks or big Busycon shell cups that would have infant remains in them.

Even our shell mounds were quickly destoyed for road fill iin the late 1800`s. The university of Tampa had shell mounds dug up and brought in tp build the foundation of the college on the Hillsborough river. The thinking of the early settlers was that these mounds were natural and couldnt be man made. I check certain shell mound regularly after storms roll in. Some of these mounds were 3 stories high. We even have earthworks here also. Fort Center site in Okeechobee was one, the indians down in Naples dug canals inland from the bay for easier travels to their sites. I could go on and on but hopefully this answered some questions.

oh yeah , as for the depth, it would depend on where it was, you go 10 ft most places and your hitting water. Sand dunes on the east coast are a possibility. Here in the Tampa area we hit hardpan around 5 ft. A few single burials have been found in the past few years discovered during construction and they were only a few feet down.

 

[Tnmountains]

This is a great read and link. What a wealth of information. A must read about the pond.
Centfladigger you out did yourself.

 

[joshuaream]

Centralfladigger's response pretty much covers it all, really great info there.

After many years of excavating, I'll say this: Burials aren't as rare as we think they are. Aside from isolated kill sites, almost any decent site that produces artifacts should have a burial area nearby. (If they lived there, they died there...)

In most areas, preservation conditions are so poor that after a few thousand years there really isn't any bone left, at best a stain. If you know what to look for, you can occasionally see evidence of the burials, but a construction guy on a bulldozer or even a knowledgeable collector might only notice the stone artifacts and miss the subtle changes in soil color/texture.

A practice I've seen many times over was that ancients often reused earlier burial sites (prime realestate is hard to come by.) Combine that with the tens of thousands of burials that were excavated by early archaeologists and WPA era programs, the multitude of sites destroyed by construction, and the sites dug by early collectors, and the easy sites with bones laying on the surface have been cleaned up. Also, given the way floods happen, rivers meander, beaches erode and grow, etc. a paleo/archaic burial near a river or along a highspot on the beach might have been scattered years ago.

Another factor now a days is that there is definately an incentive for both construction sites and even archaeological digs to NOT find remains (archies cover them up and dig the other way, construction guys usually just keep moving.)

Here are a couple of the many people I've found while walking in the desert. As long as they are covered, the preservation is great, but within a week or two of being uncovered the sun dries the bones and they become soft and powder dry and literally blow away.

 

[naturegirl]

This stuff is interesting! Thanks for the pics Joshua, "dust to dust", I've always found it comforting to know our bodies return to the earth. Here in Oklahoma the burial consisted of being covered by a pile of rocks. At least that's what Ive been told. Ocassionally when I'm out tramping around the countryside I find strange piles of rocks that just don't look natural. Could these be burial sites? I've never dug through them, just doesn't seem right. When the Osage came into oil royalties, and began burying their dead in graveyards they purchased some of the most eleborate, largest tombstones around. In our small towns around here you can tell pretty much at a glance which tombstones belong to Indian families. Now I'm wondering just when the ancients that occupied the plains began the rock-burial. I would think just more recently, or there would be a whole lot more of these graves around.

ng

 

[Cappy Z.]

You guys are the greatest.

 

[pickaway]

Good info & cool pics...