What Animals Did Native Americans Hunt In Florida
Editor's Notation: This article is an extract from the "Aboriginal Floridians" chapter of "Florida's Indians from Ancient Times to the Present,"by Jerald T. Milanich, published past University Press of Florida in 1998.
Florida Museum of Natural History archives
Since at least the 1920s, residents of Florida have been finding Indian artifacts in the bottoms of rivers in the northern role of the state. The Simpson family of High Springs were pioneers in river collecting, diving the depths and wading the shallow portions of the Ichetucknee River long before information technology became a state park.
One artifact plant past the Simpsons would offer dramatic proof of the artifact of humans in Florida. That artifact—a cleaved portion of a harpoon-similar spear signal—was made from the ivory tusk of a mammoth, an elephant which lived in Florida during the Ice Historic period but became extinct shortly after. Not just was the betoken fabricated from an elephant's tusk, it was identical to an ivory artifact found at the Blackwater Draw archaeological site near Clovis, New Mexico. In the 1930's at that site Paleoindian artifacts were plant for the first time in America in association with the bones of extinct Pleistocene animals. Blackwater Draw proved humans—Paleoindians—lived in the Americas at the stop of the Ice Age. The Ichetucknee River point, as well equally other artifacts and animal basic found by the Simpsons, showed Paleoindians were living in Florida at the same fourth dimension and they, too, must take hunted now extinct animals. Today we know that the earliest Paleoindians lived in Florida 12,000 years ago.
Who were these Paleoindians, these "ancient Indians," and how did they live? What was the significance of their stone, bone, and ivory artifacts being found with animal bones in the bottom of rivers, not only the Ichetucknee but the other limestone-bottomed rivers of northern Florida like the Santa Fe, Aucilla, and Wacissa?
The Florida Paleoindians were descendants of people who crossed into North America from eastern Asia during the Pleistocene epoch. At that time the oceans of the world were several hundred feet lower than they are today and Asia and Alaska were connected by a span of dry out land more than a thousand miles in width. The higher sea levels that followed the Ice Age accept covered that bridge, leaving the ii continents separated by the narrow Bering Strait.
Exactly when humans crossed Beringia, every bit the land bridge is known, is yet a matter of word. What is certain is that it showtime occurred more than 12,000 years agone. These early on American Indians apace spread throughout the Americas. In North America, including Florida, these ancient people lived by roaming over large tracts of country hunting game and by gathering plants and catching pocket-sized animals. Among the animals they hunted were elephants—mammoths—likewise as many other species, some of which are now extinct.
Painting by Theodore Morris
The Florida of the Paleoindians would non exist recognizable to yous or me. Lowered sea levels meant that the coasts were much farther out than they are today, especially along the Gulf of Mexico. As a upshot, Florida's land area was well-nigh twice what information technology is today; modernistic Pinellas Peninsula where St. Petersburg is situated was some fifty miles from the Paleoindian shoreline.
Lower bounding main levels and massive glaciers created a climate that was much drier; footing water levels in the interior of the state were profoundly below what they are today. Florida was cool and barren; the springs, lakes, rivers, and other wetlands so important at nowadays did not exist. In that location were some fluctuations in climate, with slightly wetter conditions replacing drier ones, simply it ever was much more arid than it is in modern times.
More than arid conditions meant that a different array of animals and plants was present. Some of those animals, like mammoths, Pleistocene horses, and a at present-extinct species of bison, had prospered during the Ice Age, but would disappear as the climate warmed and they fell prey to human hunters. Typical vegetation included plants which could alive in the dry conditions; scrub oaks, pine forests, open grassy prairies, and savannahs were nigh common. In the restricted localities where water was present plants better suited to wetter conditions were found. Because the climate did fluctuate, the vegetative communities present in any ane location fluctuated over time.
When the Paleoindians showtime lived in Florida it was during one of the more arid periods. How did the climate bear on their way of life? The answer to that question explains in large part why Paleoindian artifacts are found in the river bottoms of the northern one-half of Florida.
The Paleoindians, like ourselves, needed h2o to drink and for other necessities. Because water was in brusque supply, the places where water was available drew the Paleoindians. These aforementioned watering holes attracted animals likewise. In Florida such water sources were constitute in the limestone catchment basins of northern Florida. Although limestone formations are found throughout Florida, information technology is in the northern half of the state that limestone is common on or very near the land surface. Water from rain or ground seepage nerveless in pockets in the limestone, forming water holes non terribly unlike the watering holes found today in parts of Africa.
At the time of the Paleoindians what are now the Ichetucknee, Aucilla, Santa Fe, and other northern Florida rivers were non flowing rivers but serial of small limestone catchment basins or watering holes. At times, peradventure during slightly less arid times, surface h2o also collected where clay or marl deposits provided somewhat impermeable catchments. H2o as well could exist institute in a few very deep sinkholes fed during wetter intervals past springs.
But over fourth dimension the most consistent watering holes were those in the northern half of the state where the limestone formations reached the surface of the basis and formed catchments. That region is from Tampa Bay north through the western half of peninsular Florida into the panhandle to the Chipola River. Such formations besides extend out into what is today the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, but was then dry country. Information technology is this limestone region of Florida that drew the Paleoindians.
The same oases that provided humans with h2o also were used by animals. Consequently, not just were watering holes places where people camped, they were sites where animals were ambushed, butchered, eaten, and their remains discarded forth with other debris discarded past the Paleoindians. Today these camps are river bottoms and in sinkholes. Over two and a half millennia there must take been thousands of such camps and impale sites. Information technology is no wonder Paleoindian-age tools and butchered animate being bones are found in those rivers and sinkholes.
Now we know who the Paleoindians were and why nosotros notice their artifacts and debris in inundated archaeological sites in Florida. What else accept nosotros learned nearly them? Although artifacts picked upward from rivers and sinkholes have been important for understanding where Paleoindians once lived and what their environment was like, other types of information must come from the excavation of sites. But if most Paleoindian camps today are underwater, how can they be excavated? The answer: go in later them. This is exactly what researchers in Florida are doing, combining scuba diving and archaeology.
At the present time the largest of these underwater Paleoindian projects, the Aucilla River Prehistory Projection, is taking place in the river of the same proper noun, i of northern Florida's many limestone-bottomed rivers. Under the auspices of the Florida Museum of Natural History and directed by Dr. S. David Webb, the Aucilla River Prehistory Project has located nigh twoscore inundated Paleoindian sites in a short stretch of the river.
Webb and his research team were originally fatigued to the site past reports of Paleoindian tools and animals bones being found there. A short distance away in the Wacissa River which empties into the Aucilla, sport defined had found a Bison antiquus skull (a at present extinct species of large bison) with a cleaved stone point in information technology, dramatic evidence for Paleoindians and Pleistocene animals having lived there at the same time.
The excavations in the Aucilla River have yielded seeds and rind fragments from wild gourds, evidence that Paleoindians were collecting a found not previously known to fifty-fifty have been in Florida at such an early time. Preserved hickory nuts have been found, equally accept carved wooden stakes, maybe items associated with small, temporary tent-similar structures or lean-tos.
The Aucilla River underwater excavations also are providing new information on the animals hunted by the Paleoindians. Analysis of growth rings of mammoth tusks suggest that these animals may have been moving seasonally from north to south and dorsum again. That raises an interesting possibility: did the Paleoindians movement with the herds, post-obit them as they made their seasonal treks n in summer and s in wintertime?
An adjunct of Webb's squad's excavations is information about the diet of these giant creatures. Hundreds of samples of elephant digesta, the remains of the plants eaten and then defecated past the animals while continuing in the watering holes, accept been preserved. Found fibers in the digesta requite clues not only to the elephants's diet, just are indicators of the climate as well. Scientists accept fifty-fifty extracted elephant hormones from the digesta!
Some day comparisons of digesta samples and skeletons might even shed low-cal on the extinction of the elephants. Both pre-Paleoindian samples and samples from Paleoindian occupation are known. Show of stress caused past over-hunting may show up in the latter, perhaps in dietary changes, in comparisons of bone densities, or in the ages of the animals hunted. For instance, as herds became smaller and animals harder to find, the Paleoindians may have get less selective in the animals they hunted, seeking to kill not only like shooting fish in a barrel prey—youngsters or weaker individuals—just healthy adults as well. Only a few short years ago studies such as these would have been unthinkable.
Collecting the Ichetucknee
Equally an undergraduate student assistant in the Florida Country Museum, and then located in the Seagle Building in downtown Gainesville, i of my duties was to write catalogue numbers on the many objects of the Simpson Collection. Information technology was definitely menial labor, but I became very interested in the collection, assembled by the Simpson family of Loftier Springs, Florida, and later donated to the Museum.
Thirty years accept passed and today I am back at the Museum, which has a new name and is in a new edifice. I oftentimes have occasion to refer to artifacts in the Simpson collection, using the very numbers I wrote 3 decades ago. Of great importance are the many bone tools from the Ichetucknee River.
Recently, I ran across a mannerly article written by Mrs. H. H. Simpson, Sr., and published in 1935: "Until the summer of 1927 our collection consisted of flintstone and stone implements, shell ornaments and pottery, but in June of that year began the addition of a section that to united states of america is more than interesting, if possible, than whatsoever of the others. At that time we found, by accident, a clear river [the Ichetucknee] most sixteen miles from our dwelling. I would accept to be an artist to describe the beauty of the place. At all times the river is perfectly transparent. In the sandy portions of the bed of the river vari-colored grasses grow, waving back and forth, the different colors blending and forming a beautiful underwater moving moving-picture show in the swift electric current…. The day we establish it we waded in the clear water close to the bank, and could encounter, out in the deeper h2o, pockets in the rocky lesser which were full of bones of dissimilar shapes and sizes. Swimming out and diving Clarence brought upwardly handfuls of the material for exam. Some of the smaller pieces were smoothen, and shaped as though fabricated by manus only they were such small-scale fragments that we couldn't get in at a definite conclusion. We returned on a second trip hoping to detect some large pieces of what nosotros suspected were bone implements of a vanished race of people. As we stood on the bank and watched him, Clarence dived again and once more. In shallow h2o he picked the bones upwardly with his toes, which take been trained to serve him for various purposes abreast the ordinary use of toes. Finally we saw him brand a high leap, and run toward shore every bit fast every bit he could. Racing to where we stood, and taking a small black object out of his rima oris, he exclaimed, excitedly: "Now, I know these things are handmade!" Upon examining it we found information technology to be a upper section of a bone artifact, ornamented with lines at the superlative…. We were overjoyed! (Hobbies, 1935, 40[4], pp. 93-94).
Source: https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/science/floridas-indians-from-ancient-times-to-the-present/
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