Digging up the past

Shards give tantalizing glimpse of life on
Tick Island. Photo credit and copyright:
Florida Museum of Natural History

Last month, I wrote about historical facts surrounding the life of the heroine of my new novel, Growing A Family in Persimmon Hollow. This month, I do the same for the hero.

He's an archaeologist who's fascinated by the pre-Columbian history of the novel's Central Florida setting. True enough. The time and place intrigued scholars and amateurs in the late 1800s. But I had to stretch historical truth. The hero is the son of Italian immigrant parents who own a produce market in the Northeast. It's doubtful such a person would ever have breached the academic firewalls of the era's Ivy League.

In the novel, he's mentored by an eccentric, now-retired professor unusually free of the biases found in elite academia at the time. And the hero reached college only because a teaching sister in Catholic parochial school noticed and nurtured his intelligence.

Such individual attention in elementary school also would have been hard to come by in reality. Both my parents were the children of immigrants in the early 20th century. There were 30 to 40 children to a classroom. Many raced home after school to help their parents so the family could survive. My father did manage to get a college education, but he did so by attending night classes at a Catholic college while working full time during the day. He chose a business major that would lead to a staid career. I suspect he would rather have been an artist. It became a hobby.

I think I better plan some future blog posts about immigrants and education. Back to the novel's topic for now. In real history, archaeological remains suffered indignities in 19th century Florida and elsewhere. Then, as now, scholarly controversies and debates raged. So I imagine some archaeologists were sensitive to the humanity behind the findings. Others, not so much.

Burial and trash-filled shell mounds left by former civilizations were leveled in the name of scientific discovery. Professionals occasionally boasted about how quickly their workers demolished a site. They crowed over the number of artifacts unearthed. 

Amateur pot-hunters were busy then, too, and did serious damage. Untold numbers of artifacts were carted off. On the plus side, some scholars of the time recorded their findings meticulously. I could spend hours paging through The East Florida Expeditions of Clarence Bloomfield Moore. 

That was in the late 1800s and very early 1900s. By the first decades of the 20th century, town officials got involved. They viewed shell mounds - many still existed then - as free road-fill and paving material. 

When I worked in print journalism, local history stories were among my favorite assignments. I'll never forget one interview. An elderly gentlemen recalled youthful days of riding his bicycle behind trucks that were hauling shell into town for use on roads. He and his friends scooped up the artifacts that fell, literally fell, out of the trucks. He said town leaders  were proud of themselves for using the shell to pave roads. They were saving tax dollars.

The novel's hero learns the true 
value of archaeological discoveries.

Yes, it makes us cringe today. In the novel, a secondary character of Seminole and European descent points out what the hero doesn't want to see and what other characters don't realize. The hero's increasing awareness is part of his character growth. 

Much was lost in Florida before scholarly approaches changed and protective laws were passed. As late as the 1960s, dredging, pot hunting, and archaeological expeditions were simultaneously taking place on Tick Island in the middle St. Johns River valley. An estimated 175 burials were found along with numerous artifacts that made their way to museums or private collections. I've heard old-timers say that boxes - boxes! - full of priceless artifacts were hauled away. Local belief is that only a percentage of what's there has been found.

This important archaeological site is closed to the public today. Luckily for history and humanity, there's a good reason for the island's name. The place is also hard to access. And home to many alligators and poisonous water moccasin snakes. 

Tick Island seems to have been a significant ceremonial site. Perhaps someday, modern mapping tools, ground-penetrating radar, and other archaeological methods can tell us more about the people who once lived there. And do so without disturbing or harming anything on site. We can hope.