The tour was led by Dr. Williams and a member of the Arch Creek Park Staff (ACPS). The tour began at the start of the loop trail behind the museum.
Hunters & Gatherers
Dr. Williams: One of the important things to remember about the prehistoric people living here in southeast Florida is that they didn’t appear to have grown crops. The first people to grow crops in southern Florida were the Seminole people, who came in the 1800s. So prior to that, the archaeology sites that we’ll see back here were based on people being hunters and gatherers. There’s so much to eat in south Florida that they didn’t need to be a farmer.
Golden Orb Weavers
ACPS: If you look up there, there’s a really nice golden orb weaver web. And since you’re looking at the sunlight through it, you can see where it gets its name from. It’s called the golden orb weaver because the web is spun in a circle, so it’s like an orb. And then if you look at it through the sunlight you can kind of see a little bit of a gold-ish tint to it.
The Midden
ACPS: If you look on the ground, you can just find artifacts anywhere. This is a piece of a conch shell - this is the inner coil. And this was used by the Tequesta Indians from around 500BC till about 1500AD I believe. So they actually lived in this area, and basically what a midden is a trash dump. Kind of like where we throw all of our broken dishes and stuff like that, that’s pretty much what this is here. They were extremely resourceful, so they tried to use every single part of everything that they could possibly find.
For instance, with the conch shell, they would take the conch, bash it open, take the conch out, eat the conch, and then they would use the actual shell for things like a hammer, or maybe a grinding tool, maybe for a chisel, and things like that. We also have shark vertebrae, shark teeth, pottery, and all kinds of things that you can find just in this small area right here.
Dr. Williams: And this midden was associated with the mound probably, correct?
ACPS: Yeah, the midden actually goes all the way into the park, from what I was told, and it kind of connects to the mound.
Dr. Williams: And how many of you would guess that the midden also went that way (towards Dixie Highway) before the road went in? I’m going with “yeah”. And how long of a walk is it to get from here to the ocean?
ACPS: If you walk kind of at a diagonal, it would probably be maybe like a mile.
Dr. Williams: And does this river connect to the ocean?
ACPS: The creek does connect; it goes under 135th street and it kind of curves around behind the shopping center and then goes right out to Biscayne Bay.
Dr. Williams: So the reason that this stuff is here is probably because of that river, which is not very functional anymore, but at one time it was a big, gorgeous, tourist-attraction river. So the prehistoric people would use the places like this that were inland with the nice oak hammocks as a place to hunt deer and raccoons and possums, to gather acorns, to eat the coontie plants, and so this would have been a good resource base. But the point is those conchs didn’t hop up here - somebody brought them here. They didn’t live in that river; they didn’t live in the highway. That represents someone taking animals from the ocean and coming up that creek a couple of miles. This is hard to remember, because we’re so used to seeing shells everywhere because they’re used as paving materials. But that means prehistoric people were bringing them here on purpose. They weren’t eating the conch at the beach; they were making their homes here at Arch Creek and using all those parts of the conch here.
The Mound
ACPS: This is the mound. We’re not really sure what’s under it. I know it’s linked to the midden, somehow, because conch shells have been found here. I’m not really sure much about it. I know most mounds are burial mounds, but I think they said there was only one burial in the park, and it wasn’t over here.
Dr. Williams: If you think about South Florida, what have we got? Water. And so mounds were a place to bury folks, a place to put houses. And this probably would have been 3 or 4 times bigger prehistorically. A lot of mounds were used to fill in other areas during the historic period, because the some people it’s a big hump of clean dirt. One of my favorite things about mounds that archaeologists think that they were used for was to prove that we had enough power to make people build mounds. Isn’t that a good one? So it was a marker of power, just like people build great big giant office buildings we don’t really need, but we build them because it makes people think we’ve got the power to build a big office building.
And these mounds, depending on where they are, sometimes they’re made out of soil, and a lot of them are actually made out of oyster shells in southeast Florida. And the story had always been that these oyster shells mounds were trash; they’d eat the oysters and just throw them away in big piles. But when you excavate one of the mounds, you’ll see that some of the shells they ground up so that it was more stable, some of the shells they put on the outside to enforce the shape.
There are a couple of other good shell mounds you can see in this area. If you go up to Pompano, I know someone’s done a very nice video recently of the Pompano Indian mound that can be accessed through our website. And there’s another really beautiful mound up at Jupiter Inlet. It’s underneath this historic house called the Dubois House, and lo and behold, the house is not on a hill, it’s actually on a giant shell mound that was put there as a marker at the mouth of the Jupiter Inlet.
ACPS: There’s also a burial mound in El Portal, which is a little village, and it’s in the middle of an actual street they made into a little median. Its right in front of a whole bunch of people’s houses, and it’s kind of interesting because you’d never know what it is unless you look at it.
Dr. Williams: The nice thing about here down in Florida is they don’t have basements. So all of those 40’s and 50’s houses that got put in, the chances are there’s still archaeological remains under some of the houses. So it’s something to consider as we tear down those 50’s houses and put up big mansions; things like that Lemon City incident may happen again.
The Ravine
ACPS: There was like a ravine or something running through the park, because as you can see, it runs quite a ways that way. This is actually one of those areas where, I don’t want to get into any haunted stories, but we actually have had some sightings of Seminole Indians and things like that in this area. Apparitions, if you will, out in the distance actually gathering water and things like that. So this park is said to have a couple ghost tales about it, and this is one of the areas where some of them did happen.
The most important part about this area is that it does show proof that there was at one point in time a ravine running through the park. So it’s definitely a reason why people would want to come here, because you have fresh water running through. You’re going to have animals coming through here; they’re going to want to come here to possibly find their meals. So it’s a very nice area.
Photography by:
Jillian Krickovich & Rob Freund
