Welcome to Old Florida.

In recent years, archeologists have made major prehistoric finds in Florida waters.

They're building on a legacy that spans decades, from recreational divers who found fossils and artifacts in Florida rivers to those pioneers who figured out how to adapt techniques used by archeologists on land to an entirely different work environment.

This whole field of submerged pre-contact archeology and submerged landscape study and reconstruction- It's been great to see how far this field has developed, you know, in the past decade, decade and a half.

This is the epicenter of submerged pre-history on the planet.

We're definitely in like a renaissance of this work.

But they find here is helping answer questions on a continental scale.

Who were the first Americans?

Where did they come from?

How did they get here?

When did they arrive?

And what were their lives like?

We're embarking on an emergency archeological mission.

We are at the Simpson's Flats archeological site, which is located at Ichetucknee Springs State Park.

What are you looking for exactly?

So I'm trying to relocate the bones That we found earlier.

The site contains in situ remains of a mastodon.

And that means it's in place.

We have a whole skeleton in place, and it's important to keep it in context.

Recently, areas that had previously been capped by a significant amount of sediment are now eroding out at what appears to be an alarming rate.

What we're attempting to do is document as much of this now while we can.

It's a situation where the river is going to keep flowing and it's going to keep eroding from this bank.

And so we can either try to learn what we can about the site or know that it's going to be gone forever.

If the bones fall out of the riverbank, they lose part of the story of that mastodon, specifically, whether that mastodon had a run in with humans.

In the eighties, there were Paleo Indian biface points reported.

We've also taken sediment samples from around the mastodon remains and found micro-debitage- so really small bits of stone that were knocked off when somebody was making a tool.

Its weird- some steps.

You barely sink, and then others you.

Really sink!

To answer big questions like, “were humans here with mastodons?” Archeologists have to be precise and methodical in conditions like this.

One of the questions when we get hired is, “Are you comfortable working in mucky environments?

”And this is one of those mucky environments.

Some of these environments can be a challenge for sure.

There's cold, there's currents.

You have to be very flexible, but also very aware of your limits.

That's part of the thing, right?

We always joke on the projects that underwater archeology is a stupid sport because everything is complicated and hard, but it's worth it because the things we can find out about people in the past, there's literally no other way to do it, right?

It's messy.

It's frustrating and sometimes kind of dangerous.

But in the last decade or two, underwater archeologists have been rewriting what we know about people in the Americas.

Mastodons went extinct around the terminal Pleistocene.

So like 12,000 years ago.

So that's pretty big for people being in Florida that long ago.

And the paleo Indian period extends back past currently 14,500 years with Page-Ladson, which is our oldest site in Florida so far.

Florida's oldest archeological site is located in an area with unique geology, just south of the Aucilla River Sinks.

Basically the river comes up and down in a series of sinkholes there.

And this is all draining from like south Georgia, north Florida.

Half-Mile Rise is the longest stretch of the river that's open like this until it heads out to the Gulf.

Page-Ladson is a sinkhole that's about 30 feet deep in the middle.

And it's like, I don't know, maybe about 150 feet wide.

It's a big circular part of the river.

Page-Ladson is the kind of site archeologists dream of.

It's pre-Clovis.

When I went to graduate school, it was the Clovis first model, and Clovis represented the first people that came to the Americas.

There had been this idea that the first peoples arrived in the new world around maybe as long as 14,000 years ago, but really just right at the start of Clovis.

And these people made these large lanceolate fluted projectile points.

And all of them that have been dated date to right around 13,000 years old.

Clovis dates fit a timeline where people cross the land bridge from Asia, and pass through an ice-free corridor to enter the Americas.

If people were here before Clovis, that way would likely have been blocked by a large sheet of ice.

Clovis dates fit, and yet archeologists started finding sites that were older than Clovis.

And this whole paradigm shift is happening of, hey, maybe there's older than Clovis sites that are real.

And Mike Waters was talking about how he thought Page-Ladson was maybe one of the most interesting ones of those sites.

Page-Ladson was worthy of investigating further because, you know, back in the day when when the Clovis-first model was really strong, that a lot of sites that had great potential got pretty much sidelined.

And there was work that was done by David Webb and Jim Dunbar.

And basically nobody thought anybody could do underwater work same as on land.

Well, they developed ways of doing scientifically stabilizing or work a site underwater.

Eddie Green is a retired engineer who volunteered on decades of digs.

He designed the dredge system they used to vacuum up sediments.

In those days, there was more enthusiasm than funding, and they had to be inventive.

They developed a lot of techniques that everybody uses now.

To work on underwater sites.

So JIm and Dave went and looked at it, saw that there was some cool stratigraphy at the site, dug some test units and found that there's a lot of stratigraphy at the site.

Strata are layers of sediments.

Think of the Simpsons-Flats Mastodon.

If fossils are artifacts are preserved in a layer of sediment, they are in context.

It's a common refrain in this line of work where you need to have unequivocal artifacts, secure geologic context, and absolute ages of some kind.

Ages are obtained by radiocarbon dating preserved organic material.

If artifacts and fossils are in a layer with datable material, then the dates apply to them too.

Having all three of those is the the gold standard.

Page-Ladson had well-defined sediment layers.

This made it a promising site.

And they found in strat unit three, which is a layer that it looks like hey and sand mixed together.

They did some testing and found that that hey is actually mastodon poop.

They were hanging out on the edge of the sinkhole that had a spring in it, drinking water and, you know, like passing the food that they did not digest very well.

At the edge of this pond.

And in it, they found the bones of a extinct camel.

And of mastodon and a bison and a few horse bones and some other bones and things like that.

Some of the mastodon bones that they found were near fragments of what looked like flakes from making stone tools.

And one of the things they found that was really exciting was a mastodon tusk that had a marks on it in a place that would have been inside the mastodon skull when the mastodon was alive.

Right.

And so they're like, this was evidence that people were butchering this mastodon.

Could people have coexisted with mastodons here in Florida and with the extinct horses and camelids and bison?

If so, what was their Florida like?

For answers, we don't need to go far from Page-Ladson.

I learned to scuba dive by dropping 30 feet deep into a place called Sloth Hole in the Aucilla River, down in the inky black water where you couldn't see anything, you could only feel on the bottom.

And as I reached the bottom was able to feel around.

I could feel bones and teeth and all these wonderful things that fascinated me and has led me to be interested in understanding what the original ecology of Florida was prior to the present ecology.

The shelves behind me are essentially the results of, I would say, close to 40 years of intense excavations on multiple sites in the Aucilla river and the nearby Wacissa.

When you walk into the Florida Natural History Museum, you're greeted by another elephant relative, a Colombian mammoth found in the Aucilla River.

Fossils found in the river tell the story of a landscape filled with food.

Consider what a protein bonanza might have been available to the first people that arrived here.

It would have been a landscape that would have been, if the archeological data tell us anything, fairly attractive to the people living in North America for a lot of different reasons.

But the many large mammals here were more than food.

They existed in a complex ecological web with each other and the plants around them.

This is a partial tooth of the Colombian mammoth that used to be here.

And you'll see it's got a washboard effect.

This would have eaten probably grasses and forbs.

The upper jaw of a baby mastodon has what are called bunadont teeth.

This is probably a grazer and this was probably a browser eating brush and woody stuff.

Where there are more forested habitats, there are typically more mastodons than mammoths.

Where there seem to be more open habitats, then the situation is reversed.

Extinct grazers have modern relatives who allow us to somewhat envision the Pleistocene landscape.

The horses, the bison, mammoths, llamas.

All of these grazers attest to the fact that there was a big grassland present in the late Pleistocene time.

What we know is that around the time that humans arrived in Florida about 15,000 years ago, it would have been a pretty open environment with herbs and grasses and things like that, with some trees here and there.

Angelina Perotti studies pollen found in sediments.

Each grain identifies the genus of the plant that made it.

Pollen is comprised of one of the strongest biomolecules in the world called sporopollenin.

What's really useful is when we're able to get radiocarbon dates that go along with these pollen samples and then also other changes like changes in the animal communities or human population at the time.

Both fossils and the pollen record suggest that Florida was largely a grassland.

We can get a feel for ice age Florida In one of modern Florida's dominant natural landscapes, the longleaf pine / wiregrass ecosystem.

Regularl fire here kills back woody growth, making for an open, grassy understory.

Longleaf pine probably was here and was going back and forth between these states of being fewer pines, although still a pine fire environment, and a woody sort of environment that supported the browsers and the grazers.

At Lake Tulane in Central Florida on the Lake Wales Ridge.

It's really interesting because you see like these fluctuations between pine and oak ecosystems.

And so these are millennial-scale events where basically the ecosystem, the vegetation drastically changes.

It's like kind of an oak savannah type environment.

And then the next millennium, it's a a total pine forest.

Page-Ladson contained the fossils of multiple grazing animals and two browsing mastodons.

A pollen analysis of the mastodon layer indicated a cool, dry environment with few trees.

Humans and animals would have been drawn to this water source.

But how long ago?

Dunbar and Webb's radiocarbon dates were eye opening.

So they publish the book, talked about the stratigraphy at this date, talked about these mastodons, talked about these cut marks that were on the tusks and presented pictures of the stone tools that they had.

All of those said they were dating around 14,400 or 500 years ago.

Right?

A long time ago.

And about 1400 years older than that Clovis complex that I'd been telling you about.

They presented this evidence, but, you know, people said, well, you know, those artifacts, maybe they fell in or they weren't paying attention.

And so it just became forgotten.

They had a hard time convincing other archeologists that an underwater site could be excavated scientifically.

By the early 2000s, work on submerged prehistoric sites stopped, until Jesse and her team restarted Page-Ladson in 2012.

It was a tough year.

We got hit by a tropical storm right away.

First year was tough because a lot of hurricanes, flooding.

We're also working with old equipment that actually dated to the first Page-Ladson era.

So it was these kind of unreliable engines and pumps and diving systems.

And it seemed like something was breaking every day.

And so my first thing was figuring out how to clean out a carburetor on a motor that's been sitting for a ten years.

They loaned me dredges.

Same thing.

Like nothing would start.

Nothing would run.

I lost, like, of my first couple of field seasons, I was like four weeks each and I would spend at least a week and a half trying to fix the equipment and get it up and running and like get holes patched in boats that had been sitting in back yards for ten years.

We found no archeological material really that year.

A couple of flakes may have come up in the screen, but nothing really came from in situ in context.

They had a challenging year and not much to show for it.

Doing methodical work in this environment takes perseverance.

This is why I'm a terrestrial archeologist.

And Morgan and Jesse Halligan, they're all like, Come, come, come, come out and get scubad up and go, go.

I'm like, You guys got like water moccasins and gators.

They're like, Yeah.

I'm like, No, I'm good dog.

I'll, I'll stick with I'll stick with my land snakes that I can run from.

In the low visibility of Aucilla waters, you wouldn't even see a snake until it was right next to you.

Something about the dark water is just really, really gorgeous.

Really, really pretty.

It's actually really nice that you can't see because you're underwater, you're diving.

You have all of this stuff on your back, the scuba tank and everything.

You have surface-to-air hooked up as well.

And you're excavating in this one-by-one meter square that's directly in front of you.

All you need to do is see about six inches in front of your face.

And that's all you need to focus on.

You don't need to see everything else around you.

And I really like it because it is so dark.

You're not able to get distracted by fish floating around or maybe there's a manatee in the distance or anything.

It's actually some of the best excavation conditions, in my opinion, right?

I have been doing archeology since I was 12 years old, so more than 30 years now.

So we dig in square holes one by one meter, just like our terrestrial counterparts.

You can see by the flatness of the riverbank that they've excavated several feet down.

When they find something of interest, they bag and label it, noting its location in the stratigraphy.

You want to dig slowly?

Being slow as being precise, especially underwater.

Were never in a rush, and just being down there, only being able to see like six in just a foot in front of you really helps you focus on what's immediately in front of you, allowing you to find these things in situ.

It slow, steady work with no guarantee of finding an artifact.

But archeologists are drawn to the potential of this river and its many.

sinkholes.

The future of submerged prehistory, at least in Florida, probably the entire American Southeast is still within the Aucilla River.

But to date, only three archeological sites have been excavated and well-reported.

The land between Tallahassee and Gainesville is packed with sinks and springs, fresh water that supports a diversity of life.

You could see why humans and large mammals would be drawn here.

Except this is not what it looked like when humans first arrived in Florida.

So we're standing at the head spring of the Wacissa River, and this spring run goes down to the coast and eventually flows into the Aucilla River.

And so 15,000 years ago, when the first people came to Florida, the climate was a lot different.

It was the end of the Pleistocene, the glacial epoch.

At the end of the Pleistocene, there is a lot of glacial ice.

This transfer of water from the oceans to the land surface resulted in sea level being about 300 feet lower than it is today.

So places like the Wacissa spring here, that water table would be lower as well.

And so this probably was a sinkhole.

Ichetucknee Springs State Park where we are now looking at the Simpsons Flats site, we have this mastodon that's kind of eroding out of the bank.

But at the time that this mastodon died, it would have been high and dry.

Page-Ladson is in the Aucilla River.

It was much lower at the time, but again, freshwater source for the megafauna and for the humans.

So the modern Aucilla River sort of as essentially a fairly shallow, small flowing body that's sort of connecting a series of sinkholes.

Where you've got these major rivers in Florida that are cutting across like a limestone platform.

And in that, limestone is a bunch of great rocks that make stone tools, a bunch of great animals running around if you're a hunter gatherer.

From about Tallahassee over to the Suwannee River, it's all underlain by limestone.

So circulating groundwater in the limestone would have caused caves to form that would have collapsed, making your sinkholes.

To help us imagine what an ice age Aucilla would have looked like, we visit the Aucilla Sinks section of the Florida National Scenic Trail.

Here, the river enters the aquifer, appearing in a series of sinkholes before emerging just north of the Page-Ladson site.

A lot of these mid-channel sinkholes that are now submerged by the flowing river.

My research has really been showing that theyre collapse sinkholes, which is exactly what the Aucilla Sinks are.

Interestingly, though, the Aucilla Sinks are more recent and because they're more recent, they've had a lot more water flowing through them.

And so we don't really see too much old deposits within the Aucilla Sinks themselves.

It's really cool to think of them, though, as a modern environmental analog to what the sites submerged by the Aucilla River actually would look like during the late Pleistocene.

And we believe that when sea level was lower, water tables were lower.

Most of those sinkholes still had water in them.

The beasts that the people would be hunting would be drawn to the water in the sinkhole.

They would come here and it would be a focal point for hunters.

When sea level was lower, those rivers that flowed in clays and sands and gravels would have down-cut deeply into their beds.

And we had places like the Aucilla River, where there are ten foot or 15 foot high vertical banks with a creek in the middle of it.

And you could run the elephant off into that and just spear it at your luxury.

So we are seeing clusters of really old archeological sites in Florida around these karst sort of formations.

It's fun to think about that same features that attract us to places today hold true.

You know, as you rewind the clock through time and so as we go back a couple thousand years, or more thousand years, we keep finding that, you know, freshwater sources are places of human activity.

They also happen to provide some some great preservation.

Florida, you know, we are a state of water.

We have the second longest coastline in the contiguous United States.

And so water is not necessarily the great preserver of organic material, but it's the inorganic layers of sediment that exist below the water that create pretty much an ideal stasis-like condition that can preserve delicate organic materials for thousands and thousands of years.

Florida's geology provides an abundance of locations for water and sediments to preserve materials.

Historically, we have found sinkholes are an excellent place to preserve fossils, whether they're wet or dry.

One of the factors that harms bones are natural acids that form as plant remains decay.

As the groundwater passes through humus and decaying leaves and things, it will naturally pick up some of that acid.

But being in a sinkhole environment, that limestone just acts as a natural buffer.

It's just like you take Tums or an antacid.

So they neutralize those acids.

And so the geochemistry of sinkholes is really good for preserving fossils.

Did more mammoths and mastodons live in ice age Florida than the rest of the continent?

Were there more people here?

Maybe.

Maybe not.

But more bones and artifacts have been preserved here.

It's just that the sinkholes, the freshwater springs allowed that evidence to be preserved.

So going back to that, geology determines so much about what we can ever know about people in the past.

This is just a unique and like completely unique geological situation that gives us a chance to look out what it would have looked like everywhere.

That unique geology extends out into the Gulf of Mexico, and once so did rivers such as the Aucilla and St Marks.

You can kind of see the modern day river channels here.

There's the St Marks, there's the Aucilla.

And you can almost kind of see this little finger where the Pale-Aucilla channel would have been.

What is the paleo-Auicilla, and why is Morgan looking for archeological sites out here?

The state of Florida is a large limestone platform, and currently about half of that platform is under water.

We call that the Continental Shelf, and the shoreline back 15,000 years ago was out there.

It was an entire coastal plain that is now completely submerged.

And it would have been a continuous landscape, right, with what is now the remaining bit of Florida that's left.

With sea levels being so significantly lower than it seems like a very fruitful exercise to kind of figure out what did that landscape actually look like when people were here during the Paleo-Indian period.

It's not always a cooperative environment.

Yeah, got a little choppy out there, so we came from two miles back further in.

If you have a week, three days are automatically gone because of bad weather.

So there you're just looking at two days of actual work.

And then if you're spending half the day trying to find the site or bad weather comes in and it can really throw you off.

So we're kind of surveying this whole landscape for sites around 5000 years ago,-3000 years ago in here, 5000 where we were.

This was all dry land.

So everything you were looking at was, you know, the indigenous peoples could have and did use it and it was just like any other part of Florida rivers, springs, streams, trees, you know, grasslands.

To find sites out here.

Archeologists go to the types of places where humans, even modern humans, have always gone.

So we're cutting across both the St Marks and the Paleo-Aucilla channels to try to figure out where those channels would have been and map sites off pf them.

There was a big confluence out here, which is really good because that's those kinds of confluences are, you know, obvious physiographic features that prehistoric peoples would have mapped on to.

But I don't think there's a single river confluence in Florida that's not an archeological site.

I'm standing at the confluence of the cool clear waters of the Wacissa River which is making its way down here into the dark, slightly warmer, tannic waters of the Aucilla River, and we're standing at the confluence of these two rivers.

And just downstream of us is Page-Ladson.

LIke at Page-Ladson, archeologists had long stopped working off shore.

There really hasn't been a whole lot of work done out here.

I mean, in the eighties and nineties there was a lot of targeted kind of work that really pioneered some of the archeology out here on these submerged landscapes.

The generation that came before, like Dr. Michael Faught, Dr. James Dunbar, they were from that generation in the seventies and eighties and nineties who began to really grasp the potential and to do this in a systematic manner.

As I learned that sea levels came up and the continental shelves were exposed, I became enthusiastic about finding sites on the continental shelf and there weren't a lot of examples around.

And my major professor Vance Haynes at the University of Arizona mentioned Florida.

I had done a study in geology about where's a good place to go where the sediments are not covering the old topography, where the ocean might be gentler, and where there were a lot of Paleo-Indians, and Florida was a clear, you know, no brainer.

So in 1986, I flew out of my own nickel and met Jim Dunbar, who's a famous archeologist here in Florida.

And we went on off shore for three days in little boats, couple of little boats, and we found three quarry sites and a Paleo channel out on the offshore.

So immediately there was success.

Offshore work is starting again, but first archeologists have to relocate the sites.

It's very typical, surprisingly even today, to go out in the Gulf of Mexico on a small boat with a decent GPS unit and still have a hard time relocating a known archeological site.

What I found is that the.

Navigational chart that they were using at the time has a substantial offset, especially in the deeper water, from modern bathymetric data.

Mya Welch's undergraduate honors project was to correct the offset in the charts.

Working with Michael Faught, Mya was able to help Morgan's team find the old sites.

The hardest to find were the smaller sites.

Mya was diving offshore with Morgan when Morgan found this point.

Not every site will have an obvious artifact.

When you think of underwater archeology, you think of shipwrecks.

Those are very big.

They show up in remote sensing equipment very easily.

But some of these more ephemeral sites, which may be lithic scatters or a mortuary pond that's very small and you're in the big, big ocean.

They're very difficult to find.

We don't have a written record to kind of tell us the details about these people and about their lifeways.

We don't have an X on a map.

Somewhere where we just know.

exactly where to look.

We honestly don't even know what we're going to find until we find it.

You can go offshore just about anywhere in the world and you know you're in a high energy environment and you know that trying to find something left behind by people who lived thousands of years ago, people who did not, were not building monumental architecture and were not building bridges and roadways.

How are we going to find evidence of their life on Earth?

So one of the things I always tell students is look for things that are in the same place that shouldn't be there together.

You see a pile of oyster shell and intermingled with it, you see bits of stone tools, maybe some charcoal, a deer bone.

All of a sudden you've got a bunch of things that are not like one another that are occupying the same physical space.

These are from very different environments, right?

In that scenario, you can envision a camp where humans were harvesting oysters in hunting deer.

They left this waste behind, and over time, the site was claimed by the Gulf.

The last glacial maximum was about 20,000 years ago.

So when people moved here, the glaciers were receding, they were melting and flowing into the sea.

So people that lived on the coastal plain of Florida were probably experiencing sea level rise at a pretty rapid rate.

So anybody that lived at the coast would be rapidly moving inward over their life span.

Those environments would not have been entirely stable.

Archeologists have to find signs of people who lived on a coast that was always on the move.

So we're very curious about where the coastline was at a given point in time.

And how do you determine that?

We've got like bathymetric data, sure.

But a lot of those models are based on dating of specific types of materials.

Knowing the taxa of shellfish is important because it can tell you whether or not the shellfish were in a marshy region or if they were closer to the sea.

So if you've got oysters appearing at sites, that's going to let you know that water is becoming brackish.

You can look at mangroves, which can also be in more brackish areas, like in those intermediate zones.

Oysters and mangroves grow right along the coast.

So if you find fossil mangroves or oysters at a site offshore and radiocarbon date them, you can find out when that location was the coast.

Oysters thrive in a mix of fresh and saltwater, usually in or near the mouths of rivers.

The river system likely started flowing around 5 to 4000 years ago.

Before that, there were these kind of interconnected, isolated sinkholes.

And likely before that, the river system was flowing probably around 50 or so thousand years ago as well.

Rising water in the Aucilla help preserve sites.

You just kind of imagine water just kind of coming up slowly in these holes.

It's not a destructive process.

It's this kind of gradual inundation.

And so it's the changing from these isolated sinkholes to the modern river system, with erosion happening during that and in between those time periods, that really only creates a couple of unique zones where we have those deposits dating to 10 to 15000 years ago.

And so we don't actually know the exact nature of why they're only in some areas.

And that's what my dissertation is really trying to focus on every day.

So, Michael, we're not going to want to dredge for the first part of it.

Nick is excavating a site on the Aucilla River, hoping to find the next Page-Ladson.

That crew found plenty of fossils, but not many artifacts in the first year.

So when we worked there, what we found was mastodon bones, a couple of bison bones, some camel bones.

But not many artifacts.

It was a cause of stress.

Like, oh, my God, I'm never going to finish.

I'm not going to have a dissertation.

Mike's going to be super disappointed with me.

Jesse deserves so much respect for persevering through it.

I think any sane person would have given up.

And I'm not saying Jesse's insane, but.

But it takes a particular kind of person to just keep at it.

It taught me, like, the most important part about underwater archeology, which is that you have to be really resilient and creative.

Dr. Mike Waters is actually here on site that day.

It was kind of like you couldn't have written a better story.

He was probably going to leave in a couple of days, and I think he had he had actually said, if we don't find anything this year, we're calling it quits.

You know, like we're done with Page-Ladson.

I'll never forget the day, we were sitting on the boat.

I was sitting there with Dave Thulman.

We were watching, you know, the bubbles and everything on the surface.

And Morgan came boiling to the surface.

saying “We found a biface!” I looked at Dave and I said, “Oh, my God.

That's more than I ever thought I would ever find.” And there was this super dramatic moment where, you know, everybody wants to see it.

You know?

We found an unambiguous stone knife that really demonstrated, hey, this is really here in this stratigraphy.

We were able to gather tons and tons of material to radiocarbon date.

I said, “Well, pretend the biface is the nucleus of an atom, and collect samples from all around it for radiocarbon dating so that, you know, we're ironclad.” It was overkill on the dating, but it had to be done to demonstrate that that material was definitely in situ.

So it was able to really kind of nail down that these earlier investigations at the site had been correct on the ages of the stratigraphy, and that there were cultural materials in that stratigraphy that they had reported, right?

We got interviewed by The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune and like these, like really old school, like kind of like fancy papers.

And like there was an article in National Geographic and, you know, is really exciting because, you know, it got people really excited about archeology and like what the possibilities were.

And it made people who didn't ever think about what was going on in the end of the last Ice Age in the Americas.

All of a sudden, like they have a chance to encounter, hey, let there were people here 14,000 years ago.

It sparks the imagination.

Humans coexisted with mammoths and mastodons for a thousand years at least.

And over generations, they would watch Florida transform.

We know so much more than we used to about the world of the first Floridians.

And yet we know almost nothing about who they were.

So these are the kind of things that we're interested in, or at least I am, what people were doing, how they related to these landscapes and how people interacted with one another, and to what extent.

At Page-Ladson I mean, that archeological assemblage is something a dozen flakes, you know.

And how are you supposed to reconstruct somebody's life, a group of people's life based on a dozen flakes?

Page-Ladson site., its a couple of flakes.

It's a single biface.

It's difficult to interpret human activity based on that.

So the future really is finding additional Page-Ladsons and additional archeological sites within a similar context with more artifacts.

So we can actually start to learn and understand what Florida's early indigenous people were actually doing on the landscape and how they were utilizing the landscape and living during the late Pleistocene.

A couple of years after finding the knife at Page-Ladson, Morgan started work on the Ryan-Harley site just upstream on the Wacissa River.

So this is kind of funny to think about.

But imagine nine years ago, a flat, swampy area, lots of engine noise, dogs barking, people talking, artifacts being processed, a big blue tarp over this area with a bunch of waterlogged archeologists whose feet never dried for two months while they were out here.

And this was our camp.

This is how we excavated Ryan-Harley.

Ryan-Harley was first excavated in the 1990s after Ryan and Harley Means found Suwannee projectile points in the river channel.

Back in 99, We did what I guess you could call it, sort of a salvage archeology work.

The site was eroding.

And Harley and I happened to be there and both of us were diving and then we went right up and sniffed out exactly where the stuff was coming from.

After Morgan excavated the site in 2015, he shared his finds at the Florida Geological Survey.

He's gotten over a thousand things.

Everything here is from in situ, too, which is an archeologists dream to do that and be able to piece back what you can of the site.

He's going to make the next major contribution to Suwannee point technology in Florida, which will be interesting to read.

It's easy to think of projectile points almost as marker fossils, especially when we have solid dates on them at well-dated archeological sites.

However, the issue in Florida and a large part of the Southeast is a lot of these late Pleistocene early Holocene projectile points.

We know they exist.

You have your Suwannee, Simpson, and Clovis projectile points, but none of them are really well-dated whatsoever in the entire Southeast.

Clovis points are found throughout the continent.

But Suwannee and Simpson points are only found in and around Florida.

Because they're local, it's likely they came after Clovis.

And it kind of looks like these Clovis ancestors are settling into certain geographic areas and kind of marking out territory that they're adapted to and that they reside within.

These people adapted to Florida and places like the Wacissa, but not the Wacissa we know today.

The modern Wacissa River, as we see it here today, was not flowing like this when the Suwannee people lived here.

So this would have been instead a vast sand sheet similar to a coppice, shrubby, small elevation dune field.

And it looks like the Suwannee people camped on the backside of one of these and nearby there's a deep depression that might have been a water hole or a small, ephemeral pond.

These people are on a vast open landscape without reliable water moving up and down these drainages, trying to find food, trying to find water, trying to find shelter in a time when there's not as many resources available as there are today.

The tools they made helped them survive in this environment.

Suwannee people had a flexible adaptive toolkit strategy, which we kind of expect from their ancestors that were very mobile.

So they had things like adzes, woodworking implements, tools that were probably also used to work bone hard working instruments like scrapers, which tells us that Suwannee people are still overall uncertain about what they're going to face because if you have a flexible tool kit, it's probably because you're not really sure what the next month or three months or year look like for you.

Not all sites have projectile points or stone tools.

But they may still have something to tell us about the people who had been there.

At the archeological site I've been working on for my dissertation, the Ladybug site, we actually haven't found any projectile points in situ.

The only artifacts we found in situ are these chert flakes that range in size from about this big to about this big.

Now, these indicate people are on the landscape because it's the debris that they're leaving behind while they're making these stone tools.

So we know people were on the landscape making stone tools even without having those stone tools themselves.

So if you think about the early Paleo Indian period, we know that they made stone tools and we know that they followed reliable water sources and maybe also big game around the landscape.

But honestly, other than that, we don't really have a lot of information on them.

These people are tied to the land and they had relationships and they had kids and they had they had ideas of religion and cosmology.

And we can't really get to any of that.

We have these big questions we want to answer to, again, understand our shared human past.

And we have many different lines of evidence we can use.

And I really want to emphasize, it's not one single line of evidence that we look for.

They always say extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Right.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan.

Many lines of evidence are environmental.

We've already learned about the paleo environment from herbivore fossils, pollen, and sea level.

Sea level is tied to climate.

And just over 12,000 years ago, a major climate event would have rocked the environment.

In the Younger Dryas, of course, there's this huge climate disturbance and the ecosystems drastically change.

The climate is overall warming and warming and warming.

And then within the period of a couple of generations, things go back to really cold, really windy, really arid.

If you look at the onset of the Younger Dryas, that probably happened over a few generations.

And they were probably- if you got people who are reacting to what the environment gives them for their foodway or any kind of change in that, any perturbations in that in some way, they're going to have to adjust.

And that's going to be reflected in the archeological record.

Animals die, plants die, ecosystem shift, sea level rises very quickly during punctuated points.

And the Suwannee people live during all of this.

Not only did animals die, they went extinct.

What we've discovered recently is that there are fungal spores that can tell us a whole bunch of information about the environment also.

And so one of the most interesting ones in my opinion are coprophilous fungal spores.

These fungal spores are primarily associated with large herbivore dung.

So things like mastodons and mammoths are going to be contributing many more fungal spores to a record than something like a deer or rabbit.

And right at 12,700 ish, the concentration of the spores in the sediment record at Page-Ladson just drops off the charts.

So it's just gone.

So that gives us a good idea of the date for megafauna extinction and extirpation in the area.

That's when the cascade of ecological change happens because mega herbivores are keystone species.

And so when they are removed from a landscape, we see all sorts of ecological changes like vegetation change, but also increased fire.

Not only do sediments contain spores and pollen, but also charcoal from wildfires.

What we find in Florida is that fire was always present on the landscap.

Prior to the decline of mega herbivores, those mega herbivores were reducing the vegetation enough that even when there were fires, maybe they weren't big enough or widespread enough to leave a big record in ecological archives.

But after their extinction, we see a pretty significant increase in fire.

The loss of large mammals changed the landscape, increase the frequency of wildfires, and removed a considerable amount of protein for early Floridians.

In other ways, it made Florida a safer place.

There are several species of big cats.

The biggest of them is the American Lion.

Also quite sizable is the famous Smilodonfatalis.

Those two are lion to tiger-sized cats.

There was a large jaguar, slightly smaller than them, but still quite capable of killing a human being.

The same species of jaguar still roams South America today.

And Florida was also home to Florida panthers.

Then there are the Direwolves, which are in packs and they're larger than modern wolves.

There are two species of bears.

The alligators grew much bigger because there weren't people trapping them.

Large herbivores were almost as dangerous.

Or even the elephant - mammoth and mastodons are not going to be...They're not going to go down easy.

So there was quite a bit of risk in that habitat.

About 30 species of mammals- predators and herbivores alike- went extinct by the start of the Younger Dryas.

Early Floridians settled into a place that was in a constant state of flux.

They would have to have been adaptable people.

Changes in their culture would have gone hand in hand with changes in the world around them.

These are really abrupt changes, potentially.

Depending on how long someone's life is, they could have seen these changes within the span of a long life.

You know, this was a rapidly changing climate.

I'm sure, that had impact on longevity.

It probably had impact on animals well-being.

So there was probably all sorts of problems associated with sourcing food and finding water, and that creates stress and malnutrition, which creates intergroup conflict.

And like I'm sure there's all things that were missing.

What to me is even more interesting is what comes after the Younger Dryas.

Because then you had like the inverse happened.

It ended as abruptly as it starte.

In a relatively short amount of time, it got warm.

It started this warming trend that lasted several millennia.

It continued to warm, and sea level continued to rise.

But it was a more stable time than the Paleo Indian period.

The archaic period, on the early end, is kind of one of the first big transitions in projectile point technology, where we move from these lanceolate shapes overall to the notched varieties.

And the archaic tends to stem from 11000 to 3000 on the end of the archaic period, so theres this huge chunk of time, whereas some of the other cultural periods are a couple thousand or a couple of hundred years.

This is a massive chunk of time and there's a lot going on in the archaic period.

After the last glacial maximum, you start to have an increase in the water table.

So you've got glaciers that are melting, they're adding a lot of water to the oceans and then it's charging the aquifers in Florida.

More freshwater, more resources, and then people start exploiting marine resources as well.

So now you can have bigger groups.

We start to see kind of people developing into complex centers where they have a base camp and they're staging resources from around an area.

This is where we kind of see people adapting to the coast specifically for the first time.

So they're living on the coast.

They have these gigantic shell deposits, some of which have burials in them, and some of them have funerary remains and artifacts from all aspects of daily life.

Not all middle-Archaic people buried their dead mounds.

I studied middle archaic period mortuary ponds.

Florida has a unique cultural practice during the early and middle archaic period where people were interred their deceased in saturated freshwater environments with a lot of peat.

They were basically placing the deceased person in the sediment and they would use work stakes to hold the people in place, maybe to mark the burial.

And this was happening around 7000 years ago.

Windover is most well known.

It's over on the East Coast.

Windover was excavated by Florida State University in the 1980s, led by Dr. Glen Doran.

Researchers found 168 individuals preserved under a shallow pond.

This type of burial was not widely practiced.

These ponds, there are about seven of them.

I believe most of these are in central Florida and they have a tight time period.

So it's just very interesting to have mortuary ponds in a very specific region in Florida, very tight timeline.

There may be more mortuary ponds offshore.

Offshore sites from a similar time period are shedding light on a landscape more similar to modern Florida.

I specialize in a period that we call the middle Holocene.

So from around 8000 years ago, up until five or 4000 years ago, depending on who you want to argue with.

And by that point, sea level had been rising for quite some time, for over - for almost 10,000 years.

And it was slowing down a bit, but it hadn't stopped.

And so what you've got is a situation where it is a climate more similar to that of today, right?

So the tree cover had come back and the plants had proliferated and of course megafauna were gone.

By that point, the coastal resources were coming online and that meant that you could go down to the seashore, you could go down to the tidal marsh, and you could access all different manner of shellfish like oysters.

Middle Holocene people harvested oysters from a coastline that was on the move.

So there's some things that we know that we didn't know 50 years ago.

One of them is that people were harvesting shellfish in great quantities at a time when the sea level was not stable.

Okay.

So that throws out the window the idea that people didn't bother to use the coastline until it was stable.

If we know that we've got coastal resource usage during the middle Holocene, then that suggests to us that we perhaps want to follow the old coastline seaward, continue further back in time, sort of in a leapfrog fashion right from Econfina Channel site out to a site called Ray Hole Spring.

It's approximately 20 miles maybe.

And Ray Hole Spring had oyster deposits that weren't closely examined, got a radiocarbon date from a piece of wood just under 8000 years old.

It would have been a flowing spring.

Was Ray Hole Spring an intermediate kind of site?

Right.

Well, I couldn't tell you that because I haven't been on it and I don't have a lot of data from it.

But working the middle Holocene sites, documenting that contrary to old expectations, people were adaptable, were flexible, could live on the coast at this time when it was not stable.

Suggest to us that we can follow that trend further into the offshore.

Further offshore lie older coastlines and the potential to find older sites.

Perhaps people did harvest oysters before the middle Holocene, despite an ever shifting coastline.

Eventually, though, the coast settled.

About 6000 years ago.

The sea level rise rate slowed down markedly and we got to what we call a still-stand of sea level.

And 6000 years ago, that is when the barrier islands formed, coastal deltas formed.

And so that's when people really could establish themselves on the coastline in a more permanent way.

There's evidence on St Vincent Island that there was a large settlement there.

There's pottery, there's large middens of oyster shells.

And so probably people were down there eating oysters to their heart's content.

A stable environment meant less stressful lives for Floridians who started to leave behind more evidence of creative expression.

And the Woodland period in Florida is really typified by ceramics.

So ceramics actually start in the late Archaic period, but they really explode in the Woodland period.

And that's when you see a lot of micro regionality starting to happen in Florida.

So specific drainage basin, specific river basins, very specific geographic areas have their own types of ceramic markers.

It was a long journey to get here from here.

To learn the story of the people who made these, it has likewise been a long journey from here to here.

As Florida became itself, the waters that define our state hid away hundreds of generations of stories, and preserved them.

In recent years, more and more people are learning how to uncover them.

There's not many of us still, even though the last couple of years we've seen the number of practitioners at like the master's level, probably double or even triple from where I was just ten years ago.

The students are definitely the future.

The number of people working in submerged Florida landscapes is growing, and they're taking what they learn here to other places in the country.

The very first underwater archeology project I did was in the Gulf of Mexico.

I think the biggest thing that that project accomplished honestly was training like a whole new generation of students to that work.

Using knowledge gained in the Gulf, Ashley and her team learned something surprising about early Holocene hunters up north.

We didn't know until working underwater that peoples in the Great Lakes 9000 years ago were building these types of hunting structures.

They were completely unprecedented.

Nobody knew, and luckily they were preserved underwater.

Across the Gulf, new technologies are allowing researchers to explore sites remotely without disturbing them.

There's really also, I think, a fantastic opportunity to bring new technologies, emerging technologies that allow us to to document the world in ways that we really hadn't considered before and to really think about ways of how to best visualize those data, how to share those data, how to maybe extract measurements or to better characterize using different digital tools.

The next Page-Ladson might be hiding on the Aucilla, or far out in the Gulf of Mexico.

It could be near your favorite swim hole or fishing spot.

The sediments beneath Florida waters hold stories waiting to be unearthed.

Each new site brings us closer to understanding the lives of the first Floridians and the hundreds of generations that followed them.