Florida, the Verdant Paradise

Florida is a verdant, emerald-blue water paradise and a white sand sink hole, an accident waiting to happen. Thought to be part of northwest Africa ages ago, it was based on the theory that North America was part of the enormous super continent that absorbed Africa.

At the end of the last ice age, 12,000 years ago, Paleo-hunters arrived. The Floridian climate was dry and cold, a kind of artic tundra, as revealed by deep soil samples. Archeologists can make inferences based on dug up layers and layers of soil, strata which can reveal chemical compositions, human habitation, animal remains, plants, rocks, certain chemicals, and other materials. A soil midden holds the domestic refuse, i.e. animal bones and artifacts of prior inhabitants of the land. In south-west Florida, shell middens were preserved at the museum of the Spanish Point.

It is speculated that Florida was fifty miles wider than today due to the frozen surface water into huge glaciers which lowered the sea levels. The remains of the ancient Floridian inhabitants were covered by water when the glaciers melted. Evidence of their existence has been found off the west coast at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico and beneath certain springs.

Communities were found as early as 500 B.C. Early tribes built mounds along rivers and coasts: the Ais, Timucua, Mayaca, Jeaga, Tequesta, Calusa, and Jororo. The Seminoles, part of the Creek Nation, did not arrive in Florida until the early 1700s, after the first Europeans.

Mel Fisher’s discovery of the galleon Nuestra Señora de Atocha (Our Lady of Atocha) which sunk in a hurricane off the Florida Keys in 1622, is evidence of the prior arrival of Europeans before the Seminoles. This sunken galleon was laden with copper, silver, gold, tobacco, gems, and indigo.

The second largest body of water within the borders of the United States, Lake Okeechobee covers 730 square miles of South Florida and parts of five counties. In Seminole, Lake Okeechobee means “big water.” The Calusa Indians called it ‘Mayaimi,” which is probably where the name Miami originated.

Early pioneers of this part of Florida reported finding human skeletons in the shallows of the southern end of the lake and old fishermen stories told that nets caught human skulls from time to time.

Some speculated that they were Indian bones, others that they were victims of an ancient hurricane. The two thousand dead people who perished in the hurricanes of 1926 and 1928 have been recovered and buried in mass graves on mainland. Before 1900, less people lived around Lake Okeechobee, not enough to explain the thousands of skeletons and remains found at the bottom of the lake. Could it have been a place where sacrifices were made, and the bones added up over the millennia?

The Seminoles had only one conflict, the Battle of Okeechobee, in 1837, but only 30 people were killed. The age of the bones predates the first Spanish period by thousands of years. Could it have been an ancient village killed off by some disease? No artifacts or pottery were found though. Is it a mythical lost tribe? To whom did Florida belong?