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<< Text Pages >> Little Salt Spring - Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature in United States in The South

Submitted by bat400 on Tuesday, 22 March 2011  Page Views: 10155

Natural PlacesSite Name: Little Salt Spring Alternative Name: Little Salt Spring Archeological and Ecological Pr
Country: United States
NOTE: This site is 40.191 km away from the location you searched for.

Region: The South Type: Natural Stone / Erratic / Other Natural Feature
Nearest Town: Sarasota, FL  Nearest Village: North Port, FL
Latitude: 27.074900N  Longitude: 82.2331W
Condition:
5Perfect
4Almost Perfect
3Reasonable but with some damage
2Ruined but still recognisable as an ancient site
1Pretty much destroyed, possibly visible as crop marks
0No data.
-1Completely destroyed
4 Ambience:
5Superb
4Good
3Ordinary
2Not Good
1Awful
0No data.
no data Access:
5Can be driven to, probably with disabled access
4Short walk on a footpath
3Requiring a bit more of a walk
2A long walk
1In the middle of nowhere, a nightmare to find
0No data.
no data Accuracy:
5co-ordinates taken by GPS or official recorded co-ordinates
4co-ordinates scaled from a detailed map
3co-ordinates scaled from a bad map
2co-ordinates of the nearest village
1co-ordinates of the nearest town
0no data
4

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Natural Feature in Sarasota County, Florida.
Little Salt Spring is a sinkhole with a very low flow anoxic spring forming a circular pond. Evidence of North American Mega Fauna and the signs of Hunters and Gathers have been found here, including some of the oldest artifacts (10000 - 5000 BC) ever found in the south eastern United States.

During Florida's Ice Age prehistory, the peninsula was much drier and the spring would have attracted prey and predators. The existing sinkhole was formed about 15000 years ago. The water level has varied over time and a series of ledges 16 to 27 feet from the current surface lie beneath an oxygen depleted water layer. It's at this level that there have been finds of wooden stakes, textile fragments, hair, bone, and tools.

The Preserve was donated to the University of Miami. Rosenstiel School's Division of Marine Affairs manages the site and conducts excavations and other studies within the preserve. The sinkhole and spring are on the National Register of Historic Places.

The site is adjacent to Butler Park in North Port, but Little Salt Spring itself and the surrounding preserve are normally open to the general public only on tours.

Additional information of the finds and the difficulty of underwater excavation can be found in this article, Diving into Paleo Florida from the Mammoth Trumpet.

Note: Archaeologists hope remains of a 10k year old spear helps piece together how Florida's earliest inhabitants lived. See article summaries in comment.
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"Little Salt Spring" | Login/Create an Account | 4 News and Comments
  
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Scientists bring 10,000-year-old spear in spring to the surface by bat400 on Tuesday, 22 March 2011
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On Friday, dive teams from the Florida Aquarium and the University of Miami exploring and excavating Little Salt Spring in southern Sarasota County carried to the surface a spear that dates back about 10,000 years.

When archaeologists put pieces of it back together, the artifact will measure more than a foot long.

"You're not just doing research for research sake," said Mike Terrell, dive training supervisor for the Florida Aquarium. "You are the steward of another culture that can't tell their story anymore because they're just simply not around."

The archaeologists believe they have found the remains of camp sites or prehistoric garbage dumps.

What makes the underground site so unique is that the water entering the spring at about 250 feet deep has been underground for so long, it doesn't contain oxygen. There are no microbes or bacteria which normally destroy such relics.

"We've already recovered a remarkable range of artifacts that are not to be found anywhere else, because of this unique water environment," said John Gifford, an underwater archaeologist at the University of Miami.

Scientists eventually hope to learn more about when humans first started living in Florida and more about how our earliest ancestors lived.

He said scientists have never found such a spear in this good of condition. Wooden and charcoal items found nearby test dated to be about 9,300 years old.

"To know that you're in a place human hands haven't seen or touched in at least 10,000 years is really, really cool," Terrell said, "It's a really unique experience to be on the forefront of literally rewriting that history and writing a story that's never even been written before."

The piece will now go to Texas A&M University, which has one of the most prestigious departments for conservation of water-logged artifacts, Gifford said.

For more, see www2.tbo.com/content/2011/mar/18/.
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Divers find prehistoric artifacts in North Port, Florida spring by bat400 on Sunday, 10 October 2010
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Submitted by coldrum ---

In the pitch-black depths of an isolated North Port spring sits a silt-covered ledge that is revealing secrets about a prehistoric nomadic people, secrets held in murky silence for 100 centuries.

Now, with diving gear and artifact-collecting bags, archaeologists with the University of Miami and The Florida Aquarium are sweeping away the muck and uncovering that distant past.

This stuff could be as old as 13,000 years old, when wandering tribes traversed Florida. Their travels included stopovers at what is now known as Little Salt Spring, 90 minutes south of Tampa.

Artifacts are delicately uncovered from a ledge 90 feet below the surface, archaeologists say, offering up glimpses of what life was like for who is believed to have been Florida's first residents.

John Gifford, an underwater archaeologist with UM's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science along with aquarium divers are working together to gather the artifacts.

"In the last ice age, between about 10,000 and 13,000 years ago, the water level was 90 feet lower then than it is today," Gifford said. "It's generally thought that along that early beach area, those early humans left their tools or whatever artifacts they found at that site."

"Little Salt Spring," Gifford said, "is where we have at least a fighting chance at finding some traces of human activity say 9,000 or 10,000 years ago."

The work is painstaking and somewhat dangerous but worth the effort, archaeologists say. Little Salt Spring, they say, is one of the most important archaeological sites in the state, and perhaps the nation, for its wealth of information about the dawn of civilization here in Florida.

The sinkhole's water chemistry and temperature have helped to create a one-of-a-kind, prehistoric submerged site where late Paleo-Indian and Archaic artifacts are unusually well preserved.

"Our research has only begun to scratch the surface of what this site may reveal to us," Gifford says in a statement released this week. "The anoxic (absence of oxygen) environment at the bottom of the spring does not allow microbes and bacteria to live, so decomposition of organic material deposited there thousands of years ago is greatly reduced. Wooden and other organic tools, as well as animals' soft tissues and bones, are preserved nearly intact in this unique environment."

In 2005, Gifford and his graduate students discovered two exceptional Archaic artifacts – a greenstone pendant and a carved stone that appears to be part of a spear thrower – estimated to be approximately 7,000 years old.

The site was donated to UM in 1982. Archaeologists had suspected since the 1950s that it was a treasure trove of artifacts.

Little Salt Spring dips more than 200 feet into the ground and was frequented by nomadic, prehistoric people, scientists say. They hunted animals such mastodons and giant ground sloths, which are extinct. The first major find, more than three decades ago, was a giant tortoise shell about 12,000 years old that appeared to have been pierced by a spear.

The diving is dangerous. Besides the occasional alligator that slips through the water, researchers drop nearly 100 feet, where sunlight fades to black and the age-old silt on the ledge gets stirred by the slightest movement, cutting visibility to nearly zero. Divers must complete a 100-hour course in scientific diving to make the plunges.

Thursday marked the ninth of 10 days of diving during this excursion. Pulled to the surface was what appeared to be a spear tip and carved piece of wood. Finding stone artifacts isn't likely, as around Florida then, as now, there aren't a lot of hard rocks. So, most of the artifacts are fossilized remains of living things and wooden tools. "There just wasn't very much good stone in Florida to make tools," Gifford said, "so these early people – the Paleo-In

Read the rest of this post...
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Re: Florida Sinkhole Holds 12,000-Year-Old Clues to Early Americans by davidmorgan on Thursday, 12 March 2009
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Fascinating site.
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Florida Sinkhole Holds 12,000-Year-Old Clues to Early Americans by bat400 on Thursday, 12 March 2009
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Divers exploring a southern Florida sinkhole have uncovered clues to what life was like for some of America's first residents.

Led by University of Miami professor John Gifford, underwater archaeologists are exploring Little Salt Spring, 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of Sarasota.

Earlier this year, students working about 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface found the remains of a gourd that probably was used as a canteen by an ancient hunter about 8,000 or 9,000 years ago, according to Gifford.

Archaeologists have been recovering primitive relics from the spring since 1977, when divers found the remains of a large, now extinct tortoise and a sharpened stake that may have been used by a hungry hunter to kill the animal 12,000 years ago.

In 1986, Gifford and his colleagues recovered a skull with brain tissue from what he thinks was an ancient burial in shallow water near the spring. He continues to work with DNA samples to determine the date of the find.

Gifford and other archaeologists found more from the tortoise this past July, along with the slaughtered remains of a giant ground sloth.

The discovery of the sloth's bones, Gifford said, could indicate that Little Salt Spring was a sort of ancient butcher shop where hunters often killed their prey and prepared meat when this was dry land.

These remains come from the earliest known period of human activity in the Western Hemisphere, said Gifford, who has received funding for his work from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration. (National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society.)

"This is a warehouse of environmental, natural, historical, and archaeological remains in a very, very well preserved environment," said Roger Smith, Florida's state underwater archaeologist.

"That's why it's a world-class site. I would call it a portal back into time."



For more, see the National Geographic.
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