Submitted by coldrum ---
In the cool, buggy shade of a huge royal poinciana, archaeologist Michael Wylde dragged his trowel 1,200 years into the past.
Wylde, manager of the Randell Research Center at Pineland, was renewing an excavation begun last winter of a Calusa Indian site known as Mound 5 of Brown’s Mound Complex. “The first day you open a dig is like Christmas,” Wylde said. “It’s like, whew, here we go. What am I going to get?”
Excavation will begin in earnest Saturday, and Wylde hopes to have the work done by spring 2010.
Although part of Brown’s Mound Complex is within the 8.59-acre Pineland Site Complex, a major archaeological site owned by Lee County and managed by the University of Florida Foundation, Mound 5 is on property owned by crime fiction and fishing adventure author Randy Wayne White.
“I’m fascinated by the history of this area,” White said, explaining why he’s allowing the excavation. “A lot of the Indian mounds around here are not protected. I watched at least half a mound near my house torn up by a backhoe and hauled away.
“So, I think it’s very important to find out what we can while we can, before someone comes along after I’m gone and decides to destroy the mound.”
“Brown’s Mound Complex is a site we know about extensively but not intensively,” said Bill Marquardt, curator in archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History. “In other words, we sort of know where everything is on the site, but we don’t know what all of the parts of the site have to tell us. We’ve never had the chance to know the function of Mound 5, whether it was a garbage pile or a special-purpose mound or something else. This is a good opportunity to find out.”
Work at Mound 5 might produce clues as to how and when the dominant Calusa people became so powerful.
Source: the Fort Myers News-Press.
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