SEPTEMBER 2000

ANCIENT HISTORY UNDER THE SEA

By Bayard Stern
Managing editor, Florida State Times

Four long, thin yellow hoses descend into the Gulf of Mexico from the anchored research vessel, Mr. Tom. The hoses carry air to FSU students who are 15 feet below, searching for evidence of life on land 12,000 calendar years ago.

And they're finding it. Some of the artifacts - Clovis Points for example - even suggest settlers may have come by boat from Europe via South America, a different group from the better known immigrants who came across the Bering Strait.

"We're looking for when and from where the first Floridians arrived," said Michael Faught, FSU archaeology professor and director of the Paleo Aucilla Prehistory Project.

The submerged archaeology site was a heavily forested area 12,000 years ago. As the ice age ended, waters rose and today, it's four miles off the coast.

It's one of two sites used in the six-week field school run by Faught for FSU's Program in Underwater Archeology. Twenty-five staff and students rotate between the 12,000-year-old sites and the comparatively recent shipwrecks - mere hundreds of years old - off Dog Island.

Ten students live on the Mr. Tom for one-week operations such as side-scan study, mapping, dredging and stratigraphic study. All the students rotate jobs as divers, dive masters, screen deckers as well as cooks and cleaners. They also have individual research assignments.

One job is working a floating screen deck, anchored off the bow of the Mr. Tom. It's a pontoon with a screen in the middle and large suction hoses attached. Two students sit on top, and watch bottom matter, pumped up by divers below, filter through a screen at their feet. Small bits of shells and seaweed gush through the screen, but occasionally bits of flint - or even chipped stone tools - remain.

"This is all we have found so far today," Rachael Horlings, an FSU archaeology graduate student said on a hot July afternoon, holding up a thumb-nail-size piece of chipped flint. The piece, just like a complete arrowhead, will be recorded and catalogued according to where and how it was found, and its description.

So far, excavations in 1998 and 1999 have uncovered three complete spear points dating from 11,500 years ago. Field school participants also have found fragmented skeletal remains of extinct animals including mastodons, ancient American horses and tapirs.

"Mike Faught is a pioneer in this field," said Mike Arbuthnot, a graduate student specializing in underwater archaeology. "He's created an amazing program that is really exciting, potentially dangerous and a great way to learn by actually diving on sites."

One of the dangers had been apparent just minutes before he spoke, when the divers were pulled out of the water because of a quickly approaching storm with lightning.

Faught has been at FSU for three years since he received a Ph.D. from the University of Arizona at Tucson.
Underwater archeology students and staff are also working on a shipwreck survey of Dog Island, a barrier island off Carrabelle in Franklin County.

"Most people think of shipwrecks when they think of underwater archaeology, but there is also a whole record of human history, possibly extending back more than 12,000 calendar years, that is covered by the oceans," Faught said. "We are not only discovering these sites, but we are also developing the methods and the principles that others can use to do so."

Faught is particularly interested in exploring a theory that early peoples came to Florida from the sea, instead of from the land. Spearpoints called Clovis fluted points have a distinct style and are found primarily in North America, and particularly in the eastern United States. However, they have never been found in Siberia, or Northeast Asia, where migration is known to have come over the Bering Strait.

"When the second occupation was here ­ the middle archaic occupation ­ this area was right on the beach, right at the coast line," Faught said.

"Northwestern Florida's Apalachee Bay region has an abundant record of Paleoindian occupation emerging at the end of the last Ice Age," he said. "The rise of the sea level since then has hidden many of the sites, and we want to know where these people came from, when they got here and how they were adapting to the new world environments."

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