Archaeological and Historical Conservancy

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...

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...

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...