I live in Saint Petersburg, Florida. There is a mound on private property eight blocks away. The owners said that when they sell the property I am free to scrape it for two weeks or three weeks or however long I have. There is a mound dead in the middle of the acre. All together there are 1,800 known sites within the county lines. I have found scrapers in the alley behind my house when gas guys cut lines. I have know of it for years. Nobody knows it is there. I will leave it until people who know no better get there with backhoes to dig a foundation for a very expensive house.
They used to mine the mounds here to build roads. Any and every construction site, and especially ones near any water - salt or fresh - can produce incredible things.
And then there are the Everglades. God knows what is there with the pythons and the gators. I have hunted five different spots there that friends told me about - one of which produced the only cache I ever found. Pure Paleo stuff. Definitely hunters, not farmers. Federal land, I have to assume, or leased or owned by sugar companies. I got out of the car, walked a half mile to the spot, and started finding stuff in a half hour. Less. It is all on my desk or in my cases.
The point is that those artifacts are never going to be as honored or as protected then if people like us get them. The cultures here had 150,000 people in two major groups (Weedon or safety harbor and calusa) when the spanish got here. They and their cultures were destroyed. They will remain buried forever without any man knowing anything ever happened here - and there is evidence of 20,000 years of human occupation.
Who is protecting who?? I surface hunt for the most part, although there are private properties we have access to (me and my two primary hunting friends) where we have dug and will still dig.
The federal government isn't protecting anything from anybody. I have seen the collections in the dark rooms at the universities. And I have seen them on the walls of my friends and my home. Where are they better off?my grandchildren will get them and by then they will be illegal and priceless.
We do not dig burials sites. The two local cultures had ritual burials. Even the oldest sites show specific mounds for the purpose of burying the dead. We did find twelve skeletons once. There were artifacts all over the place, but we did not touch anything. It had to be either a sacrifice or a fight. A bad one. And that site is still secret. The site is in a saint Petersburg neighborhood. There is an intact ritual mound behind a church in south saint Petersburg. And a dozen on grounds around a golf course that has never been developed. It is probably the least thirty acres on the peninnsula..
And we are not rural at all. Completely covered with concrete. But where it has not been paved, there are artifacts. And I hate to see them covered in asphalt.
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on this site after reading all this? 
