Video
The Windover Site_Voices from the Past
Transcript
Speaker 1: Hi. I'm sorry, I just called in, but I'm having a really hard time getting the WebEx to come up, is there a technical issue?
Karen: Not as far as I know. We are discovering that we, I have sent out the wrong, not the wrong ... but the URL that's in the body of the email message apparently is not correct, but the URL that's in the announcement itself is correct.
Speaker 1: Great. I'll try that one, thank you.
Karen: I wonder if GoToMeeting is having some difficulties, because I'm having trouble getting the recording going, too. All right. Now we're recording. Good afternoon, welcome to the ArcheoThursday webcast, and thanks for everybody's patience. I'm Karen Mudar, an archeologist in the NPS Archeology program. The program has offered webcasts throughout the fall on topics in archeology. Before I introduce our speaker today, I have a few announcements. We've started posting previous webinars on the Archeology Program website, and now have two presentations up, and you can find them under Training and Education, in Topics in Archeology on the website map. In order for the recordings to work properly, they have to be opened in Internet Explorer. Fox fire, Mozilla, or other internet formats will give you a very unsatisfactory listening experience, as David Anderson discovered a couple weeks ago.
The most recent webcast will be posted soon, and this was a presentation by Clarence Geier, and he focused on work that he and students have been carrying out on the Civil War Cedar Creek battlefields in Virginia. He and his team have been working to reconstruct parts of the cultural landscape at the time of the battle. Thanks to the use of metal detecting and GIS to collect and analyze data about battles, we're still learning new things about Civil War battlefields and battles, which is very cool. Today's webinar is the last ArcheoThursday for 2012, but the series will continue in January 2013. Clay Mather had to cancel his webinar a couple weeks ago, but he's going to reschedule, and talk about recent archeological and historical investigations into the 16th century contacts between Native American, Native Mexican, European, and African communities in northern Mexico and the south-western US. This very nicely complements the emphasis that the Department of Interior has placed on Hispanic contributions to our history and our nation that is now ongoing.
Also, Dennis Blanton, curator of Native American archeology at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History has agreed to speak in the ArcheoThursday series in January. His presentation hasn't been finalized yet, but we hope that he'll talk about his research reconstructing the climate regimes at Jamestown, Virginia. The difficulties that the colonists had in getting their venture off the ground may not have been due simply to poor planning and poor public relations. They may have had a little help from the weather, too. Also in the new year, Dave Conlin, chief of the NPS Submerged Resources Center will give an encore presentation of his excellent overview of the laws and policies that apply to submerged resources. Dave has recently returned to work after a dive accident, and his friends and colleagues are delighted that he's recovered so quickly. So I'm finalizing the schedule for these talks, and I'll send out announcements as soon as I have more information. As always, please set your phone to mute and remember to unmute it when you have a question. Our speaker, Glenn Doran, will entertain questions during the talk, and there will be time after the presentation for questions and discussion as well.
Despite looming fiscal challenges, I hope everyone has a merry holiday season and a Happy New Year. In the words of Click and Clack, “Don't drive like my brother!” Please be safe. Today, I'm very pleased to introduce Glenn Doran, who besides being the chairman of the anthropology department at Florida State University, is the project director for the Windover site. He will be talking to us about this amazing Archaic cemetery. It's yielded over 150 burials, and they were found with preserved organic materials, including woven materials, antler, wood, bottle gourds, food remains, and bone tools. The Windover cemetery, being submerged, was also challenging to excavate and conserve, and the team has pioneered new excavation and preservation methodologies to recover and study the organic materials. The Windover site was first discovered during road building for a subdivision, when heavy equipment operators pulled human remains out of a pond.
After the importance of the site was established, in a nice example of private and public partnership, the developers altered the plans for the subdivision and rerouted the road. They also contributed money for the archeological project. Today, the Windover site is safe from further development, and a portion of the cemetery has been left unexcavated, for a future generation of archeologists. Before I turn the platform over to Glen, I wanted to make sure that everybody has been able to get on to the website and will have access to the images that Glen is going to be talking about today, because they're really a fabulous set of materials. Is everyone able to get on? Does anyone have any problems? Everybody's with us? Okay. Well, Glen, I think we're all aboard, so thank you very much for accepting our invitation to speak today, and I'm turning it over to you.
Glen Doran: Well, thank you for inviting me. I must confess, I really never get tired of talking about Windover. It truly is a once in a lifetime opportunity. All of us get phone calls when somebody says, "Hey, guess what I found in my backyard," and that's exactly what happened at Windover in 1982. I was a new young faculty member at FSU, and literally got that phone call. Since that time, we have really been beholden to an awful lot of people scattered literally all over the country, who have come in and provided specialized analysis for us. That analysis is still very much ongoing, and it covers everything from the DNA to the skeletal material, dentition, the peat, the pollen, the phytoliths, gut contents, it goes on and on. We are still actively doing a variety of lab work on the site now. Excavation finished in 1986, and as Karen was saying, talk about the stars and the moon all lining up. You had a private citizen call and make an effort to get ahold of us. Fortunately, they had some very good connections with the state legislature, and they were able to basically lobby for us, and were able to get funding for three years of fieldwork and one year of lab work. We've also had external funding from a number of sources as well.
Everything really did just fall into place, but had it not been for Jim Swann and EKS, which is the development company, I certainly wouldn't be here. The site is about forty miles east of Disney, down in the central part of Florida. The bottom photo there is actually a publicity photo for the Windover Farms housing development. They took it a year or two before the burials were discovered. It looks just like any of another hundred thousand little ponds in central and south Florida. There is absolutely nothing about it that gave any hint as to what was there. This is literally what we saw when I came down in 1982 and looked out across this. This is where the road was supposed to go. I've got to tell you, it was probably one of the ugliest, least-promising-looking places you could ever imagine, but when you walked through and looked at the spoil banks, you started to see amazingly well-preserved human skeletal material. And in all of the spoil banks from the back hoe work, there wasn't a single piece of ceramics, which is usually one of the hallmarks of Florida sites.
Now, this is I think, without really much exaggeration, the entire non-perishable inventory from Windover. That's it. Obviously, if that was all we found at Windover, I wouldn't be here and you would be listening to somebody else, but in fact, because it's a wet site, and because we were able to de-water and excavate in a controlled manner, it really opened up an incredible window into the past. We really were, from the very beginning, incredibly fortunate. These are a couple of the original Windover skulls that the back hoe operator had popped up with the back hoe. His description was, as he was moving the peat off to the side, because they have to have a solid surface upon which to put sand in to build a road, he saw a couple of round rocks roll out of the peat bog. He thought, "That's not right, you don't find round rocks in a peat bog like this." Of course this is what attracted his attention, and as they say, the rest is history.
We worked very closely with the developer, EKS, they worked very closely with Thompson Pump and Manufacturing out of Port Orange, Florida. With a series of pretty large pumps, about the size of Volkswagens, basically, we were able to control the water, eliminate it, keep it from flowing into the excavation area, and pretty much proceed in a relatively normal excavation manner. To do that, we installed over a hundred well points, initially in a portion of the pond, and in the last two years, the well points completely encircled the pond, and gave us very, very good control of any water flowing in. Here's some of the well pointing process. Dave Dickel, who I went to school with at UC Davis in California, was able to come on board. It was a wonderful collaboration, and this is the kind of project that you really have to have a lot of support in. A lot of hands have been involved from the very beginning, and each person has had a huge role in doing this.
After you get rid of all the water, you should have seen about five to six feet of water across this entire area, we could begin to do excavations in a controlled manner. If you look, most of the burials are coming basically right at waist level. You had five to six feet of water, and another couple of meters of peat on top of that, before you get into the burial strata. It was a bit of a challenge to get there. This is a National Geographic reconstruction of what was probably going on 7 plus thousand years ago. Our best reconstruction is people were wading in to the margins of this small pond, scraping back some of the peat, putting the body in, often in a flexed position like this, and quite frequently wrapped with handwoven fabrics. A number of the burials show these stakes that were physically pinning the bodies below and in the peat layer. If I was redoing this illustration now, I would probably dig them deeper and have the bodies completely encased in peat, probably by about ten or fifteen centimeters, but this is not a bad early reconstruction of what was going on at Windover, and
there are other sites like this in Central and South Florida. One of the things that we were able to do was maintain very close physical control on all the provenience information. We've got over 20 radiocarbon dates, they all cluster around 7,200. It is an unusually good cross-section of a living population. About 50% males, 50% females, 50% adults, 50% sub-adults. It gives us a very unique chance to look at issues of paleodemography, population health, and so on. If you started ticking off the things that make the site interesting, and certainly significant, there's a whole list of things that have come out from Windover. The fabrics are pretty spectacular; it's one of the largest, most complex set of handwoven fabrics in the New World from this time period. We came up with 68 burials. We've got a really good opportunity for reconstruction of diet, both through isotopic analysis as well as the physical gut analysis of the gut contents.
There's also a pretty interesting collection of bone and antler and wooden tools, as well as several bottle gourds, Lagenaria siceraria here, that pushed back bottle gourds by about 3,000 years. We've now got a couple of other sites in the southeastern Florida that approach that data as well. A lot of these things sound unique, but this is what was going all over North America. It's just that we don't see it preserved outside of these special wet site situations. Florida has an astonishingly good inventory of early skeletal material. Some of this has only to do with the fact that you get this kind of preservation in wet and saturated sediments. It also has a very clear indication of pretty high early populations in North America. There were a lot of people living here, 6, 7, 8, maybe even 9,000 years ago. We certainly have some sites that are older than that in Florida, but they don't have this kind of preservation typically. We were involved in putting together basically a Windover of North American skeletal samples, and as you see all over the world, the vast majority of our samples that we have to reconstruct life with really come from the last couple of thousand years.
It's a combination both of preservation issues as well as population size. This looks, actually, pretty similar to a reconstruction you would see from Europe as well. Where the bulk of the individuals do come from the last couple of thousand years. When you plot this on the North American subcontinental scale, we've got small samples, sometimes only single individuals, scattered really from coast to coast, north to south. In the last couple of years, we've been able to work with another large collection from Buckeye Knoll that I'll show you some pictures of later. It's hard to really see anything that looks like, quote, “a colonization pattern.” There were lots of people all over the place. Certainly not at high population densities, but they did cover the landscape.
One of the things that we ran into was when you started trying to collect this database, and you started talking to people about old samples, some of them turn out - they really weren't as old as people thought they were, or there had been dates that had resolved a dating issue. Some of these early samples haven't really been looked at carefully. Some of them have been looked out but there's a lot of data that's missing. Clearly you're dealing with very small sets of individuals to really represent the first five to six thousand years of the human presence, maybe even longer, in the New World. Obviously, we started fieldwork just before NAGPRA kicked in and it's a different world today. It would be difficult, but I think not impossible, if we worked very closely with descendent communities to excavate another site like Windover. I think it's possible, but it certainly would be more complex and more challenging than it was when we began our work at Windover.
One of the things that we can see, when you have a large number of individuals, is you start to pick up those patterns that have to do with status, have to do with differences in males and females. For example, we see that almost all of the dog and cat kinds of bone tools are almost exclusively found with males. We find some of those bifaces, those projectile points, are found with females. Females, in general, have more bone tools, maybe related to some of the weaving instruments used in making these handwoven fabrics. There's a lot of detailed analysis that we're able to do. There's a mix of extended burials, a mix of ... This burial is on its face up here in the top left. We've got most of the burials are flexed, more or less, with their head to the west. On the right you can see here some of these wooden stakes still in place that would have been covering that burial. From a practical standpoint, when bodies decompose in a wet environment, they tend to float. From a functional standpoint, you pin them in place and that literally holds them down in the peat materials.
The discovery backhoe certainly pulled up large chunks of peat out here, and there was probably some, what amounts to flow of peat and scatter of burials, but in the northern section of the pond, things were pretty much intact and had not been disturbed by that act of discovery. It may have been a little bit flatter pond bottom and the bodies may simply have not have migrated down to the deeper sections of the ponds. Here's some of the bone and antler tools. A lot of deer bone is common. We also have bobcat, we also have dog tools as well as dog teeth, pretty good bet that they're domestic dogs, not coyote or wolves. Deer antler and deer bone obviously provides an incredibly important resource for all populations in North America. In this area, in fact, most of Florida, it's a very depauperate area with respect to stone tools. They're very, very scarce, and that didn't seem to be a real problem. There were plenty of other materials around for all of those day-to-day functional needs.
At the time of occupation, the site was probably about fifteen to maybe twenty kilometers from the Atlantic coast. Certainly, we don't see strong evidence of marine orientation. That comes from the stable isotope work as well as a very, very small number of marine artifact resources. These are some shark's teeth. These all had been collected from beached sharks that had blown up onto the coast in big storms. This is almost the entire marine inventory there. You can see one of these shark's tooth has two drill holes in it and it was probably fashioned onto a small wooden handle of some sort. The dog teeth up on the top left all have asphaltum or a glue-like material. These may have been used as cutting tools to do some of the bone and antler work, as well as some of the woodwork. There are a lot of options other than a pretty scarce lithic resource and inventory down there.
Manatee, from the St. John's River, was probably also harvested. This is a very large manatee tool on the right. Very, very dense, very hard, we've got other atlatl parts, many of which have a broken end. In the one in the top left, there's actually a piece of dental material that has been driven in and glued in place. These are not just atlatls, there's something else going on in terms of function. Certainly the riverine resources in that area were more scare 8,000 years ago, but there was certainly a lot of harvesting on the St. John's and possibly the Indian River, but mainly on the St. John's and some of the scattered ponds in that area. You see these, basically, harpoon-type points that would have been hafted.
Speaker 4: [inaudible 00:23:06]
Glen Doran: I'm sorry, say it again?
Speaker 4: [inaudible 00:23:13]
Glen Doran: I can't quite hear you. I've lost it. Here is an inventory from a single individual. This is probably a female, about eleven years old, not entirely sure. You see the sub-adults have a surprisingly, in some cases, surprisingly rich inventory of bone and antler material. We've got this one little biface, plus deer antler, plus deer bone, plus dog bone, plus shark's tooth. These were the things that this young person took with them to the next life. One afternoon, one of the excavators called and said, "You know, I think we've got some fabric material showing up on a burial." This is the first photo of one of these first exposures. Initially, it's sort of like looking at the clouds. The longer you look at it, you start to imagine things. I said, "Well maybe it is, maybe it's not, call me back in ten or fifteen minutes when you get more exposed." Literally in about fifteen minutes, this is what popped off that piece. At that point, you know you're looking at prehistoric twine. There's just absolutely no other explanation.
Then from that point on, this is in the third excavation season, looking at the more or less intact burials, you started to see fabric in lots and lots of other places around the bodies, all handwoven, not on a functioning loom like we would see with European contact. In some cases, when you lifted up the rib cage and the upper elements, you could see large expanses of fabric under it. Everything in that left photo, where those ribs and the humerus was, is in fact a fabric block. The processing of the fabrics removes the outer cortex of the plant material, and it makes them very, very difficult to identify a species, but they are almost certainly in the sabal palm, saw palmetto families. There's bunches of this stuff around. They all have really nice long fibers, that once you strip them are very, very durable and can be woven into all sorts of things. There's bags, there's some cape-type materials, there's some material that is about ten strands per centimeter, and this is about like what you would see on a tee-shirt top, right around the neck, so very, very finely woven.
Here is one of those blocks being removed intact. We've packaged it; we used spray foam to hold it in place. This would be air shipped, often carried, to Jim Adovasio at the University of Pittsburgh. All of the fabric materials are at Mercyhurst with Adovasio now. It's taken a long time to go through the conservation process, using the technique referred to as paralyne conformal coating. A pretty elaborate process that lays down, almost on a molecule by molecule layer, a consolidant that stabilizes and preserves the fabric materials. We had to play it by ear in some cases to figure out what was the best strategy for preservation. This is another burial, you've got a couple of strips of fabric across it, you've also got some fabric remains underneath the body. This chunk of fabric on the right is one that did not make it. It kind of disintegrated on the way to Pittsburgh, but you see the incredible detail that survived in these kinds of wet site areas. It's about as coarse as a modern saddle blanket. This is a pretty heavy woven material.
Adovasio has done the analysis on this material, and it is an astonishingly diverse set of weaving skills. When you look at woven materials from a more recent time period, it's a really fairly narrow range of twining patterns. This was much, much more diverse. One interpretation is you have sort of trimmed this technology down to a tighter set of more conservative, productive strategies, where there was a lot greater diversity in this early time period. Again, we presume that this was a kind of material that was all over North America, South America, and Central America. This did not spring up at Windover. This was part of a much, much older tradition that came into the New World with the earliest immigrants. Here are some of the highly polished bone tools, almost certainly used in the weaving activities. These are again highly polished, long-term repetitive use, pushing the fabrics down, tacking them together, to make these materials into the items that they were interested in.
Here's another burial, there's some fabric with this. It also has, towards the back, almost an intact bottle gourd, Lagenaria siceraria. This one's about the size of a ping pong paddle. You can tell there's no seeds in it. The stem is gone. I've tried to grow bottle gourds a number of times over the years, and you can't just toss the seeds out. They sprout, but they don't go all the way to production without some human intervention. I would probably be inclined to think of these more as a semi-domesticate than anything. That doesn't quite fit with some of our rather simple models of hunting, gathering, forage, at this early time period. I think these guys, at least in Florida, were starting to settle down into perhaps smaller geographic areas where some of these little garden plots that produced the bottle gourds could really be tended a little bit. After a few generations, these things would disappear. I've seen it happen here in Leon County. Wild stands last for a couple of years, and then they're just gone. They really do I think have to have some human intervention, that then raises the whole question of where did they originally come from, how did they get into the New World which is, as I say, another topic for another show.
Here is one of the items that was preserved with one of these burials. It initially looked like a bottle gourd, but in fact it's a section of preserved prickly pear. The fresh one was growing on the north side of the site, so there are some food items that were placed with these people. We've also done analysis of bulk content from the gut area, Lee Newsom at Penn State is working on this. In fact, just last week, I shipped her another series of samples. We are continuing to do research on Windover materials. One of the challenges in addition to the fabric material was dealing with some of the wooden artifacts. We did a couple of things experimentally. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn't work. We have a lot of naturally occurring wood to work with. Ultimately, we decided that the best strategy was to take some plaster casts of some of the sharpened stakes, because we weren't sure at that time whether or not we could get them through the conservation process.
The primary consolidants for the bone and antler is this material called Roplex, Roplex AC33. It's an acrylic emulsion that soaks in pretty quickly to bone and antler as well as wood. This is what it looks like when you use it on a piece of wood. This was bigger than a pool cue, almost wrist size, and while it looks good, there's almost no internal structure left that's intact. It just comes apart, so you have to use another strategy. You have to tailor your conservation to the material and what's been happening in terms of internal degradation. Again, these are the kinds of things that every population in North America would have had in abundance. They just don't survive outside of these very special circumstances. Noreen Tuross at the Smithsonian, and now at Harvard, has done a variety of stable isotope studies and pretty clearly show that this is not a strong saltwater marine orientation. This is much more of an interior small pond, St. John's River kind of focus, with a lot of upland game as well, what we call upland game here, rabbits, raccoon, and deer.
In this whole area, we're not talking about more than five meters of elevation, so everything truly is relative when we talk about upland game, especially in Florida. This is much more likely the area that most of the resources were coming from. We really don't have a good handle on what the seasonal round was like, almost all the burials that we've done analysis on have food items that would have been most common in the late summer, early fall. That sort of gives us some hint that there may have been some seasonal movement, but we just don't have comparable sites that we can get another part of that season round. Interestingly enough, in the next year or so we'll be working right out there on Cape Canaveral. It is a recent geological feature, but along the western margin, we may be able pick up some earlier sediments so it will be interesting to see what comes off of those excavations.
We know there's Pleistocene megafauna out there. It's not associated with humans and it may be much older, but that's part of the challenge sometimes in working in Florida is the surprising abundance of megafauna in certain locations. Context is not always easy to sort out, but certainly this is one of the things we're trying to do, working very closely with both Noreen as well as with Lee Newsom. There's some bone material preserved in those gut contents, but it's much more of a small seed, small fleshy fruit material that shows up. Some of these items are almost certainly medicinal, they had medicinal properties, may have had to do with intestinal parasites, maybe even control of pain. One of the ladies who had a large inventory of elderberry, nightshade, and yaupon, these things have some active pharmaceuticals in them that might have helped her particular situation. She had a pretty extensive case of osteosarcoma, which certainly in the terminal stages would have been very, very uncomfortable. Again, this tells us a bit more than simply diet and seasonality, in some cases it can give you a very personal story about individuals' lives.
Another individual that also illustrates a personal saga. This is a young person, about fourteen years of age, with an acute case of spina bifida occulta. It causes some neurological problems in the lower extremities. The tibia is completely eaten up with an osteomyelitic infection. There was no distal end of the tibia, there was no foot. This was not a person who was walking around on their own for at least the last six to eight months of their life. A pretty massive, ultimately fatal infection that was spawned by the spina bifida, this congenital problem. Again, this is a very poignant story that also tells you about these people's ability to take care of people in ways that don't quite fit our simplistic vision of hunter gatherers, certainly not at this early time period.
Your mother was right, you should always brush after every meal. This is an incredibly large abscess, probably the cause of death. We don't get a lot of dental cavities, because they're wearing the teeth down pretty rapidly. Certainly abscesses are not uncommon in early populations like this. You also, and we'll see a couple of illustrations of some peculiar dental anomalies. If you look to the left of that mandible, do you see a pre-molar, as they say, in an inappropriate position? This is actually erupting through the front portion of the mandible. Just one of those odd little dental anomalies you can pick up. That's the beauty of having a large skeletal sample, is you really are able to start talking and thinking about a population as opposed to the isolated individuals. Here's what a young person looked like, up on the left. Classic, shovel-shaped incisors, third molar hasn't erupted, more advanced attrition.
When you look more carefully at attrition analysis for aging, in almost every case where we've ever done this, it pushes some of your older individuals up into older age brackets. I don't think it's unrealistic through the detailed analysis we've done here and at Buckeye Knoll, to envision a very small number of folks, even at this early time period, living into the 70s and maybe even into the early 80s. You can go anywhere you want to in the world, in some of the harshest demographic environments, like Madagascar and Mozambique, and there are always a few people, who by good fortune of constitution, luck, whatever, make it into the 70s and 80s and even beyond. When you do dental attrition analysis for age, that's when you start seeing some of these older individuals come creeping out of your statistical analysis. It's a pretty good place to live overall.
With Colette Berbesque, and a number of others, we've looked at linear enamel hypoplasias. Here's a couple of pre-molars and the canine. Looking at these growth insults, what's going on during early tooth development, gives us a window on early childhood health. Again, you're starting to look at population parameters at this early time period. You can't really do this with one or two samples, and there are plenty of those early 5, 6, 7,000 year old samples that truly are one or two individuals, and it really doesn't give you a decent statistical analysis, whereas these large samples give you that ability to make what we think are firmer inferences about prehistoric health. Cribra orbitalia, this sort of honeycombing of the orbit is not uncommon at Windover. May have to do with, anything as much as anemia which can be caused by several different biological or metabolic problems. It's sort of a generic indicator of physiological stress.
We can start to tabulate this information, we can start to look at other samples that are in some cases a little bit older and some cases much more recent, and start to try to reconstruct truly what it was like to be alive, at least in Florida, 7 plus thousand years ago. We talked about degenerative problems, simple infection, what we also see are some individuals that have pretty graphic evidences of injury. This is a classic blow-out fracture to the eye. Blew out the back portion of the orbit, the muscles would have been tethered back in this little hole back in there. This person would have had had what you would have called in the old days a wall eye. It simply would not have tracked normally. It was frozen in space. Here's a much older individual, with this fused lumbar vertebrae, a lot of osteoarthritic problem. It's a testament to both how long you could live and probably a pretty vigorous life as well.
Another fairly personal graphic story. This is the hip of a twenty-nine-year-old male. This is a deer antler tine projectile point; the point was still embedded in the hip. There's absolutely no sign of healing. The individual was almost entirely intact, except for the skull and the first three cervical vertebrae. This would lead you to come up with a forensic interpretation that he had been beheaded, and I think it's a reasonable interpretation. There's bound to be, in all populations, some evidence of violence, some evidence of fracture patterns that may tell us about life. This is one, clearly there was some sort of a conflict here and he paid the ultimate price. We see a number of other kinds of traumatic injuries. This is a classic depression fracture to the back of the skull. One of my students suggested that that might have been done with one of those atlatl handles. That's a pretty good tool to whack somebody up the side of the head. This one's nicely healed, there's no permanent damage.
If you are using an atlatl, I think you can think in terms of atlatl elbow. Florida has one of the world's largest collections of prehistoric dugout canoes, one of which dates to about 5,670 years, uncorrected. If you think about travel in some of these areas, it's certainly much easier to get around in a canoe. I think you also see some shoulder trauma and deterioration and elbow deterioration that probably suggests both throwing nets as well as paddling as well as using an atlatl. These are the kinds of deteriorations that we see on a fairly common basis. This was a Schmorl's node on a vertebrae, an indication of a fairly rugged life and survival into relatively, a ripe old age in Windover where it was probably fifty or sixty, with a small number again, making it up even further than that. Overall, now, compared to a lot of populations in later time periods, these folks are fairly healthy.
Some of them have a lot less stress in comparison to some groups that have a bit more. Males tends to be a little bit healthier than females. There are all these sort of demographic parameters that we can start to tease out of samples of this size. The average male was about 5'6, female about 5'2. When you compare this to other populations, recently people have started using stature reconstruction as one index of overall population health. There's some problems with doing this across large geographic areas, but it's certainly one approach. There are later populations on the plains that were much more robust and much taller than these folks, down here in central and south Florida. We are starting to pull together some of this broader comparative data, looking essentially at Mesolithic populations in Europe. Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic, the exact description is a little bit variable depending on where you are, but certainly these would all have been hunter gather, fisher, forager-type populations.
One of the things that we see in some of those European populations and Asian groups as well is a surprisingly more rich, robust set of burial goods, than what we see here. One of the things that that is sorely missing is a lot of good cranial and dental metrics from samples that are poorly preserved. One of the things that we have been doing, and Christo Janowski at Arizona State has been doing, is been putting together a much larger dental and cranial data set. The dental metrics, particularly, I think, have a lot of promise for early populations. We're starting to look again broad geographic areas to try to see how these groups compare, how they're similar, how they're dissimilar because even if you have poor preservation for cranial metrics, usually the dental metrics will be there, unless you've got a lot of dental attrition, but even then you can still tease out some of the information that may help us understand population variation.
Here's sort of a picture of some of the diversity, the variability, in the Windover population. A lot of osteologists, when they've looked at the collection, they really do a double-take, and they say, "Are you sure these folks are 8,000, 7,000 years old?" We've done a really careful job of radiocarbon dating, and it just speaks worlds about the incredible potential for wet sites. Under the right circumstances, they are absolutely mind-boggling, in terms of what you see that you know was everywhere but it's simply been missed. I think a lot of us, in standard terrestrial archeology mode, have often thought, when you get to the water table you stop digging. Bad idea. There's a lot of interesting stuff down there. Using modern laser digitization and software programs, you can reconstruct facial profiles, this sort of thing. The forensic anthropologists like doing this, and this is one of older females from Windover.
I have no idea whether anybody would have recognized her in that community. I have some issues with the whole process of facial reconstruction or facial approximation, but we are able to do this because we've got really nicely preserved skeletal material. There's more and more detail going into the statistical analysis of the dental metrics and the cranial metrics. Chris and some of his colleagues at Arizona have seen a number of things that show up that suggest the females, scattered all across the pond, tend to show less diversity than the males. The suggestion is, the males are marrying and moving into this community, and the females are the residents of this area. It's a matrilocal-matrilineal type operation. It fits with what we know of modern Southeastern populations, at least at the time of contact. One of the things that Adovasio saw with some of the fabric analysis that they did matches some of the dental analysis. It suggests there are clusters within the pond that suggest different areas of the pond were used by different lineages or bands, that there was some communal separation there.
We also have picked up a couple of older dental traits from Windover as well as from Buckeye Knoll, that are very, very low frequency appearances in North American populations, particularly this thing called a talonid cusp, and a somewhat more common Uto-Aztecan premolar, which is a mouthful. Here's some of the reconstructions of the divisions that Christo Janowsky and his team are looking at that are starting to give us this picture of more complexity within the burial population than simply one large sort of amorphous uniform group. There's some other things going on there that we're just starting to get to. This is that unusual talonid cusp. We've got several people at Windover who have this. When we looked at the Buckeye Knoll material that dates between 5 and 7,000 years, a little more recent, we also pick up some individuals from there. This may be an early marker, but it's always at a very low frequency. It's certainly something that is an early North American population marker.
This is what that talonid cusp looks like when it's been worn down in a typical hunter gather forager population. When we first saw it, we really didn't know what we were looking at, couldn't figure out what sort of an anomalous dental development this was. In fact, it's a talonid cusp that has worn off and it changes the appearance, at least at a glance. These may be the oldest talonids in the world, we're still pulling some comparative data together. Certainly, Windover and Buckeye Knoll share some similarities in dental morphology that may not be characteristic of later populations. We're also starting to get a little bit more data from Paleo South American samples, but once you go past five thousand years, the numbers really do drop off. It becomes a real challenge to get samples that will give you any sort of statistical confidence, let's say.
Here's not only that individual with the talonid cusp, but this is sort of a classic Uto-Aztecan premolar. It was first identified in more recent populations out in the Southwest, but in fact it's much, much older than those relatively close to contact 2,000, 3,000 year old individuals. It is a very, very early trait in the New World, you might argue we could re-name it, but I don't think that's going to happen. We do start to push it back into time. A number of people are looking at global diversity, ancient lineage kind of concepts, but the samples are often very difficult to collect and often very poorly preserved, a lot of missing data. You can think of it sort of as playing fast and loose in terms of chronologies. You're lumping people who are 8,000 years old and 9,000 years old with people who are 3 or 4,000 years old. If you look at some of these kinds of populations from a demographic standpoint, there's a lot of extinction undoubtedly going on. You don't have every early group having descendant populations that make it to the present time. Populations are in the wrong place in the wrong time, environmental features, stress, just a numbers game, and they disappear.
That I think helps explain why we're starting to pick up more diversity in these early populations compared to more recent populations. Again, there's a lot of sampling issues and a lot of analytical details we're still sorting out. Sometimes when you look at some of these comparisons, you get Windover clustering with some unusual groups, like the folks from Easter Island who are much more recent. They tend to drift off with some of the Ainu and Japanese populations as well. There's some interesting things going on, but there's some real statistical and sample challenges to do this kind of analysis. Sometimes you get some strange results that you don't know quite how to interpret. We do know, and this has been coming out for a number of years, that those early populations in the New World do seem to be more diverse. They do seem to be, quote, “different,” from later populations. I think it has to do primarily with the extinction process. I don't think we have to come up with totally new populations coming into the New World, because when you look at some of the places they're supposed to be coming from, we're also missing those samples as well. It's a real statistical quagmire, I think, but it's worth looking at and thinking about.
One of the things that has been personally frustrating has been some of the DNA analysis. We had great and high early hopes that we would get really good preservation and be able to do some really interesting things with the mitochondrial DNA, particularly from some of the soft tissue and bone and the dental samples, but it turns out there's been a lot of damage. I think after about 2,000 years, you start to see a real serious deterioration issue. We've gotten some early analysis that pointed in some directions that people said, "Oh, well this looks like, this represents some sort of a Caucasian population." I think a lot of the peculiar connections tend to be through damaged DNA. We have started in the last year to work with Eske Villerslev in Copenhagen, and I'm waiting to see the next step of analysis. New techniques are coming on all the time. We're getting better, they are getting better at reconstructing fragmented material, filling in the blanks, so I think this is going to be interesting to see what happens in the next couple years.
It's been a slow process, and damage is just really a problem. You can't look at samples and know which samples are going to have better DNA and which ones are going to have worse. I'm a big believer in submitting samples and seeing what happens, and I feel the same way about pollen analysis. There's a lot of sites we've looked at in the last couple of years, where people have talked about, "Oh, there's never any pollen preserved." Well, take a look, you'd be surprised. We just ran some samples from Cape Canaveral, which everybody said, "In those sandy soils, you're not going to get anything preserving," but in fact, you do. Not always, but enough to make the analysis worth doing. Like I said, we're starting to look at broader, coarser-grained analysis across larger time periods. There's some interesting possibilities coming out.
We've published a major synthesis on everything we had at Windover in 2002. There's probably another volume in the works that's going to take a little bit longer. We've published more in the journals in the last decade than anyplace else. If you do a Google Scholar search on Windover, you can come up with a lot of technical articles in the major national and international journals. These wet sites are in fact absolutely amazing. They just really blow your mind, when you see the materials that were missing in a typical terrestrial site. Back in 2000, we had an opportunity to look at some materials from a site in south central Texas, at Buckeye Knoll near Victoria. Took a couple of years of very patient negotiation, consistent discussions about the importance of samples, why these materials should be analyzed. We were ultimately able to get the Buckeye Knoll skeletal materials to Florida. It is the third oldest large sample of pre-5, 6, 7,000 year populations in the New World. They do appear, but you really have to pay careful attention these days, obviously. There's a lot of people interested in these early samples, and later samples as well, and with good reason.
This is a photo of Buckeye Knoll. There's some interesting geoarcheological going on here. The top portion of this knoll has basically been scoured off in the last 4, 5,000 years, and it's sort of sandwiched some fairly recent burials down very close to and almost in and on top of burials that go back 6 and 7,000 years. The geoarcheology is challenging in some of these sites. There was a lot of interest in Buckeye Knoll, Texas Historical Commission, Texas and New Mexican tribes, tribal groups, Corps of Engineers was responsible for the excavation, but we were able to get, I think, a lot of interesting information. Now, it's not a wet site, so preservation is a problem, but it has some interesting dental data particularly. And, to warm the cockles of the traditional archeologist's heart, it also has some pretty spectacular lithic materials preserved.
Here's a section of the Buckeye Knoll, this is the top of the cemetery area. Pretty bad preservation, but we can still squeeze some information out of it. Once we started going through it, in the lab we also started turning up more sub-adults, that had not been visible per se in the field. The collection of materials is really quite remarkable, with respect to lithics. Lots of polished stone, lots of flaked stone, really large bifaces. This is a quite spectacular thing. Here are some early projectile points, some banner stones. There are some fluted points here from below the burials. Much more of what you expect to see in a typical terrestrial site. These folks, I'm sure, all had the same sort of fabric inventory, same basket inventory, it's just that we forget about it, and we focus so much on the nonperishable materials, and with good reason. That's what survives.
Once you've excavated a wet site, there's a lot of times when you look at some of the terrestrial sites and think, "Boy, if we could only find a wet site in that area, what would we learn?" I think we've all sort of said, “Well, we've hit the water table, it's time to stop excavation.” Coastal margin, edges of lakes, along stream beds, stream valleys, little pools, these things have some real interesting possibilities, and we frankly have ignored them in many cases. It may come as a surprise, the oldest wet site I know that has preservation of organics, probiscidean skulls, seeds, wooden artifacts, bone ... is somewhere about 800,000 years old. It's the Gesher Benot Ya'aqov site along the margins of the Jordan River in Israel. People have to have water, and where there's water, there's a potential for wet sites. I would encourage you, you can do a Google Scholar or a Google search for GBY site, and you will see some amazing things. They're out there; we just have to pay more attention to these wet and boggy areas.
The Buckeye Knoll report is now online through the Council of Texas Archeologists. It's about a three volume publication. It synthesizes the skeletal data we have for Buckeye, and compares it to some of the Windover data. For the traditional archeologists, the lithics will be really fascinating to take a look at, and I encourage you to go up there. That's one of the beauties of the internet is you can get this information out to a really, really wide audience, very, very quickly. I don't know what the final page count on Buckeye Knoll is, it's I think well over a thousand pages. If you download it, brace your printer. Like I said, we're starting to look at other places around the world, trying to really focus on these early populations, early samples. What do we know about early weaving techniques? Certainly Adovasio has seen a lot of materials from Mesolithic and Upper Paleolithic Europe, and he would certainly argue that woven materials go back probably 30 to 40,000 years. It is an old technology that is simply hard to document. These are the kinds of things that we think about.
This is an old burial from Italy, absolutely laden with shell materials, bone material, preserved in a cave. We don't see quite that kind of elaborate burial inventories at this early time period in the New World. That may be telling us something as well. I mentioned this early site in Israel. We've also got some fairly good preservation of skeletal materials in a couple of wet sites off the coast of Israel as well. Here's a schematic of a shaman's burial, again with a really impressive inventory of the organic materials, in this case, primarily bone material. We just really are missing things. If we can handle those early samples better, I think we'll start to have a better understanding of population movement, population migration, issues of where are people coming from, how are they moving across the landscape. We've got some real interesting possibilities here in Florida. There's all sorts of speculation about when Florida and the New World was first occupied, and I think we have to keep looking, we have to keep talking, and we shouldn't eliminate what sometimes might seem kind of wild ideas, but we've always got to really evaluate them.
One of the things that's hard to get a handle on is early population diet. There's been almost no stable isotope studies of Paleoindian material. It's easy to say Paleoindians certainly were terrestrially focused. Well, a lot of our coastal, marginal sites are now under ten, fifteen, sometimes twenty meters of water. Adovasio and some other researchers are starting to look in the Gulf Coast area. What they turn up in the next few years will be real interesting. They will certainly be challenges to excavate, but in those coastal fringes I think are going to be some real, real interesting inventories if we can get to them. One of the other things that is obviously coming up, some people out in the West see this more frequently, as well as in Canada and throughout some of the higher elevations in Europe; in addition to this wet preservation situation, you also are getting glacial ice pack melting, snow patches melting, and you get again some amazing materials being preserved.
I'm probably one of the only people you will ever talk to who actually sees sort of a bright spot about global warming. Here is a 5,000 year old biface, complete with cordage, mastic, the business end of an atlatl. It's just thawed out of the ice. The Canadians have been doing some real interesting work on trying to target those areas and send teams in. The University of Colorado at Boulder is doing the same thing in the upper elevations of the Rockies, which I think will be real, real interesting in the next decade or so. Like I said, obviously there's some issues with global warming, but it does give us some interesting potentials from an archeological standpoint. I must confess, I'm still as excited about archeology in North America and anthropology in general today as the first day I started doing excavations more than thirty-five years ago. We live in some interesting times. There are certainly some interesting challenges to our profession, but the potential, I think, is still enormous. Florida is, they have an old ad that said Florida is a special place, and it really has been, especially for me, with sites like Windover. That's the proverbial sunset photo, the last one.
Karen: Glen, thank you for a wonderful talk.
Glen Doran: My pleasure.
Karen: Do you have time to entertain questions?
Glen Doran: Would be happy to.
Karen: Do we have any questions from the audience? Well, while you guys are pondering, I have a couple of questions.
Glen Doran: Okay, sure.
Karen: I was really interested in the woven materials that you recovered from the Windover site. Has anybody tried to duplicate them?
Glen Doran: Yes, Jim Adovasio and Rhonda Andrews, when they were at Pittsburgh, made some mock-ups of some of those things. Jim's comment was, you couldn't train everybody to replicate them. It's a three strand weaving technique that took some kind of special eye hand coordination. He said, not everybody had it. He says, once you learned it, you could actually make the stuff pretty quickly, but it's not something that appears in the later time periods, it's something that seems to be primarily in this early epoch. They haven't replicated entire pieces, but they have done replicas of sections so they could look at the weaving pattern.
Karen: Did they use palmetto?
Glen Doran: No, they were using I think modern sisal. It was easier to work with. It's relatively tedious to process some of that palmetto and sabal palm.
Karen: I wonder too if you would be willing to talk a little bit about, maybe symbolism of burying people underwater?
Glen Doran: The best I can say is if you look in Contact Period's populations in the Southeast, there were a number of groups, I think the Cherokee may have been one, that had the idea that if you put bodies across a pond or across a river, that the water would act as a spirit barrier and hold malevolent spirits at bay. In a way, maybe that's what was going on here at Windover, in these ponds. We've had three or four sites like Windover in Florida, this is the only one we've actually been able to excavate in a controlled manner. It was something going on in central and south Florida. Maybe the water above them also acted as sort of a spirit barrier. That's really about the extent that I can go. It is a peculiar burial pattern for North America. I have leads on one site in Central America that seems to be pond burials. I'm still trying to get more information on this. It disappears, by about 6,000 years it's gone in Florida, it doesn't show up after that. You see much more typical terrestrial burials. This was a dryer period of time, we had not achieved modern climate still about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. This was a fair amount more arid than Florida of today.
Karen: Do you think that people were living near there, this couldn't have been their source of water?
Glen Doran: No, you wouldn't think so, but we've done some really strange things in our own water sources even today. We don't really have a good handle on where habitation sites are in this area. There's been a lot of development here, and there hasn't been a lot of survey work. That's one of our goals of working out on Cape Canaveral in this next year, to see if we can turn up admittedly a small geographic area, but a number of other early sites. Most of our discoveries down there for these early sites are very anecdotal, and somebody says, "You won't believe what I hit," or they bring in a collection of artifacts. The inventory of early sites is pretty darn small. A couple of papers have been done on gender differences in terms of status and the burial inventory, there's a little bit of work going on in that area. It's harder to come up with some of the cognitive interpretations that some people might try to push for.
Karen: How interesting, thank you. Do we have any more comments or questions for our speaker today? No? Well, thank you very much, and we will see you back here in January, everybody, when we continue our speaker series. Glen, can I talk to you for a minute after everybody's gone, do you want to call me on this number?
Glen Doran: I will call you on that number in just a few moments.
Description
Glen H Doran, 12/13/2012, ArcheoThursday
Duration
1 hour, 11 minutes, 43 seconds
Credit
NPS
Date Created
12/13/2012
Copyright and Usage Info