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On This Land, The Charles Deering Estate to be featured at Coral Gables Art Cinema

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By: Cathy Guerra | August 14, 2018 The Deering Estate Foundation’s award-winning film On This Land, The Charles Deering Estate will be featured during a Lunch and Learn event at the Coral Gables Art Cinema on Tuesday, Aug. 28, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:15 p.m. The event is sponsored by the Coral Gables Chamber of Commerce in partnership with the Junior League of Miami, Coral Gables Museum and Deering Estate Foundation. A panel discussion will include historian Arva Moore Parks and archaeologist Bob Carr who appear in the film. On This Land, The Charles Deering Estate was written by author and preservationist Becky Roper Matkov and produced and directed by Carl Kesser of Kesser Post Production. Research involved trips to Chicago, Sarasota and Sitges, Spain and interviews with historians, archaeologists, a former Florida governor and descendants of Charles Deering. The new documentary was created as a project of the 100 Ladies of Deering, a philanthropic circle of the nonprofit De...
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Wild & woolly: Mammoth bone fragment found in the Cape

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By CJ HADDAD ( cjhaddad@breezenewspapers.com )  ,  Cape Coral Daily Breeze A bone fossil, measuring about one foot in length and 10 inches in width, was found during UEP construction in the Cape. Utility workers stumbled upon a mammoth piece of prehistoric history last month when a long bone fragment was found during the North 2 Utility Expansion Project. The bone, measuring just about one foot in length and 10 inches in width, is believed to be the remnants of a large extinct trunked-mammal, most likely a mastodon or woolly mammoth. "It's a fairly large bone fragment and is unlikely to be the only bone in the area," said Ryan Franklin, assistant director of the Archeological and Historical Conservancy Inc., which was called to assess the fossil bone discovery. Their field assessment states that "the bone likely came from a horizon of gray clayey sand below several more superficial horizons of fine poorly drained sands and clays." The bone recove...
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Preacher’s Cave Yields First Evidence of Elusive Lucayan-Taino DNA

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An international team of scientists led by Dr. Hannes Schroeder and Professor Eske Willerslev from the University of Copenhagen successfully reconstructed the full genome of a Lucayan-Taino individual from a thousand-year-old tooth discovered at Preacher’s Cave on Eleuthera in the northern Bahamas. Previous attempts to extract DNA from other samples from archaeological sites across the Caribbean had limited success because of the poor preservation conditions common throughout the tropics. The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The results indicate that the Lucayan-Taino ancestry can be traced to northern South America. The researchers also found evidence that the Taino, the first indigenous Americans to feel the full impact of European colonization after Columbus arrived in the New World, still have living descendants in the Caribbean today. The tooth that Schroeder and his colleagues used to reconstruct the genome was disc...
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How Archaeologists Are Rescuing Miami's History From the Rising Sea

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Egmont Key, which has lost half its area to sea-level rise, was the site of a forced relocation of the Seminole people by the U.S. Army. A few more feet of water would flood 16,000 archaeological sites across Florida. JESSICA LEIGH HESTER MIAMI—When Hurricane Irma sprinted toward Miami-Dade County, Jeff Ransom couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t just worried about gusts shattering windows, or sheets of rain drowning the highway—that’s far from unusual near his home in Broward County, where extreme weather verges on routine, and patches of US-1 are regularly submerged. Ransom, the county archaeologist, was preoccupied with an oak tree and its 350-year-old roots. If the tree capsized with enough intensity, he worried, the flailing roots could dislodge human remains. On a blazing blue morning in early November, weeks after the storm, we trek to the site of the Tequesta Native American burial mound that kept Ransom awake. “All night long, I was just thinking about that oak tree flipping...
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Native American history from the school

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Today we received news from Madeline, a teacher regarding an interesting project to revamp their class website letting the students help out with adding some of the content. Claire is one of the students involved in this project, and she have been investigating about Native American history. As part of her research, our website shows up. We are glad to hear that our website has been useful for Claire, who shared the information with her class. She also found the graphic we share here about Native American dwellings. The original source is in this link . It is a pleasure to help, and maybe one day Claire and her class can visit us in one of our archaeological projects, and view in person the material evidences of the Native American history.
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Historic Nike Missile Unveiled in The Everglades

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The Cuban missile crisis celebrated its 50th anniversary on November 20, 2012. For two days preceding the anniversary a reunion was held of veterans of the four Nike Hercules missile bases constructed in south Florida to counter the Russian nukes in Cuba. The main event was a tour of Section C, a base built on an agricultural holdout in Everglades National Park known as the Hole in the Donut. The hole was finally absorbed into the park, and through the efforts of one veteran, Charles Carter, the base was preserved as a historic site and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, with park rangers assigned to interpret it. AHC staff Bob Carr and Tim Harrington became acquainted with Carter while working on The Everglades , a cultural history of the park recently published by Arcadia. Carter offered the use of his archive of photographs for the last chapter in the book which concludes with the Cold War era. He also invited the authors to attend the reunion as his guests, from wh...
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Miami Circle

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The Archaeological and Historical Conservancy played a major role in the discovery and preservation of the Miami Circle, providing an opportunity for archaeologists and archaeological technicians to uncover the Circle, and donating over $40,000 to the project cost. We also directed the analysis of over 143,000 objects that were recovered from the Circle, many now featured at an exhibition at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida in Miami. The Miami Circle was discovered in September of 1998 during routine archaeological monitoring on a proposed condominium site at the mouth of the Miami River. Miami Circle Showing Circular Posthole Pattern Then Miami-Dade County Historic Preservation Director Robert Carr supervised the excavation of several test units which revealed basins cut in the bedrock, each filled with black dirt midden. Surveyor Ted Riggs recognized that the basins formed an arc, and hypothesized that it might be part of a circle. In September 1998, a 40 foot diamete...
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