#windover bog people

[the1beardedgent]

BREVARD HISTORY: Windover's Ancient 'Bog People' One of Most Significant Archaeological Finds In North America - Space Coast Daily

[writinginmywritersdungeon]

“Bog Bodies in Windover, Florida”

sometimes when I feel sad I think about the bog bodies in Windover, Florida

there are bog bodies in Europe

but those are considered to be sacrifices

or accidents

they’re people who for one reason or another were tossed into a bog

to shrivel

to preserve

to stay frozen in time forever

but the bog bodies in Windover, Florida

dear god dear lord there are so so many of them

at first you might think

it is a mass sacrifice

but no

this is a cemetery

these people were laid to rest with so much respect and care

that some of them have intact brains

we can see what their final meal was

we can see what they were buried with

we know that these people were loved so so much

their flesh has rotted away

we will never know what the bog bodies of Windover, Florida might have looked like in life

but we know that they were cared for so strongly in death

so when I’m lonely I think about

how wonderful it must’ve been to be loved

like the bog bodies in Windover, Florida

[spikekat]

also.... i relate far too much to ancient floridian windover peoples putting their dead to rest in the bog. swamp is magic, swamp is safety, swamp is home. glad to know florida has been the same for eight thousand years.

[tlatollotl]

Venice is Florida's unofficial capital of fossil hunting. Divers and beachcombers flock to this city on the Gulf Coast, mostly seeking palm-sized teeth of the Megalodon, the enormous shark species that went extinct 2 and half million years ago. In the summer of 2016, a diver searching for those relics picked up a barnacle-crusted jaw from a shallow spot off the shore of Manasota Key. The specimen sat on a paper plate in his kitchen for a couple weeks before he realized it was probably a human bone.

The diver sent a picture to Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research, where it landed in front of Ryan Duggins, the bureau’s underwater archaeology supervisor. A single molar was still attached to the jawbone, and the tooth’s cusps were worn smooth, likely from a diet of tough foods. “That���s something we don’t see in modern populations, so that was a quick indicator we were dealing with a prehistoric individual,” Duggins explains.

With a team of fellow underwater archaeologists, Duggins relocated the dive spot about 300 yards from the shore and 21 feet below the surface. “As soon as we were there it became clear that we were dealing with something new,” Duggins recalls. First, he spotted a broken arm bone on the seabed. Then, when he noticed a cluster of carved wooden stakes and three separate skull fragments in a depression, Duggins realized he might be dealing with a Native American bog burial site—one that had been inundated by sea level rise, but was miraculously preserved.

The discovery was announced today by the Florida Department of State.

During the last ice age, the Floridian peninsula looked more like a stubby thumb than an index finger. But beginning around 14,000 years ago, the global climate began to warm, causing glaciers to melt and sea levels to rise. Florida shrank over the next several millennia, and countless places where prehistoric people once lived, hunted, and buried their dead disappeared beneath the waves.

Marine archaeologists traditionally believed those now-submerged sites would be too fragile and ephemeral to survive the violent thrashing of the sea. “The vast majority of underwater archaeological projects have historically been focused on shipwrecks,” Duggins says. However, in the past couple of decades, some prehistoric sites, mostly scatters of stone tools, have been identified off Florida’s coast. Duggins thinks what he found near Manasota Key proves these underwater landscapes have much more archaeological potential.

In 2017, the team went back to the site to excavate a small test unit. They carefully dug through layers of peat beneath the seabed, sometimes using chopsticks and pastry brushes. They found densely packed organic remains, including more human bones, sharpened wooden stakes and textile fragments. Radiocarbon tests on the wood indicate the site dates to 7,000 years ago, during the Early Archaic period, a time when Florida’s hunter-gatherers were starting to live in permanent villages and adopt a sedentary lifestyle. So far, the researchers have counted a minimum of six individual sets of human remains, but “there’s probably going to be a lot more,” Duggins says, adding that their surveys of the site suggest the whole graveyard could spread across an acre.

Archaeologists already know that some ancient Floridians during this time period buried their dead in shallow, peat-bottomed ponds. In the 1980s, construction workers found human remains while clearing muck from a pond near Cape Canaveral on Florida’s east coast. Excavations at the so-called Windover site revealed an 8,000-year-old peat graveyard with more than 160 skeletons, some with their brains still preserved, as well as wooden stakes and textiles. Similar burial practices were also found at sites like Ryder Pond, Republic Groves and Bay West, Duggins notes, but all of these were inland.

“What we currently are thinking is that when an individual passed, they would have been wrapped in handwoven fibers and sunk to the bottom of the pond,” he explained. “A series of fire-hardened and sharpened stakes would be pounded into the pond bed around the body with the tops of those stakes protruding above the water line.”

Similarly, Duggins thinks the site near Venice would have been a watery graveyard, a small pond in a marsh made up of infilled sinkholes and natural springs, at a time when the site was likely 10 feet above sea level and part of Florida’s mainland.

Michael Faught, an archaeologist who pioneered prehistoric underwater archaeology in Florida, says the Manasota Key Offshore site has “impressive preservation of organic material that are rare terrestrially.”

“These items can help us reconstruct environment, subsistence, and cultural behaviors, and these data can be used to see how behaviors evolved over time, or if there are new immigrants to the area, or both,” Faught adds.

That scientific information hasn’t been gleaned from the human remains and artifacts just yet. The bones are undergoing a slow drying and desalination process at the Forensics Studies Lab run by anthropologist Heather Walsh-Haney at Florida Gulf Coast University. Once the bones enter the collection of Florida’s Bureau of Archaeological Research, the department will send out a nationwide notice to Native American tribes who may want to claim ancestry of the remains and have them repatriated under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Duggins is already consulting with the Seminole Tribe of Florida on respectful treatment of the remains.

“We are happy to be working, shoulder to shoulder, with the Bureau of Archaeological Research and the residents of Manasota Key to identify a preservation plan that will allow the ancestors to continue to rest peacefully and without human disturbance for the next 7,000 years,” Paul Backhouse, the tribal historic preservation officer for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, said in a statement.

Duggins has also been trying to raise awareness locally with groups like the Manasota Key Association that could help keep watch over the underwater graveyard. In Florida, removing items from an archaeological site without authorization is a misdemeanor; knowingly disturbing an unmarked grave is a felony. Thousands of people visit the nearby beaches and waters, and archaeologists don’t want a site that’s remained largely intact for millennia to be destroyed by mundane activity, like anchor dropping, or worse, looting.

“We only know about it because someone came forward,” Duggins says.

[shatar-aethelwynn]

I was wrong, and that’s fantastic. America does have bog bodies: the Windover bog people. While they aren’t as well preserved as those from other countries, most of them appearing to be no more than skeletons, the amount of preservation they have had is enough to list them as “bog bodies”.

They were found in 1982. Long enough ago to have been forgotten by the average citizen, but recent enough for me to feel surprised that I haven’t heard about them before. I wonder if the reason they aren’t as well know is because they don’t have fully preserved bodies for people’s imaginations to run wild emotional speculations about. Or maybe that’s because the archaeologists believed the location was a normal cemetery, and there were no speculations about criminals or murder. No sensationalism. 

(Also, of course we have bogs in the US. It’s a really big place! But we also have marshes, swamps, wetlands, and fens. Very few people are trained to know the differences. Which, if I understand correctly and I’m not trained in this, has do do with the type of plants, the type of soil, and just how much water is consistently present.)

[mitchipedia]

The Windover Bog Bodies, Among the Greatest Archeological Discoveries Ever Unearthed in the United States

The 7,500-year-old remains of 167 people found in a Florida bog in 1982 shows they lived a “hard but good life,” 3,500 years before the pyramids were built.

Theirs was an incredibly caring society. Children’s bodies were almost all found to have small toys in their arms. One older woman, perhaps 50, showed signs of having several broken bones. The fractures occurred several years before her death, meaning that despite her handicap the other villagers cared for her and helped her even when she could no longer contribute significantly to the workload. Another body, that of a 15-year-old boy, showed that he was a victim of spina bifida, a crippling birth defect where the vertebrae do not grow together properly around the spinal cord. Despite his many deformed bones, evidence suggests he was loved and cared for throughout his life. These discoveries are mind boggling when one considers how many ancient (and even a few modern) societies abandon the weak and deformed.

www.ancient-origins.net

http://mitchwagner.com/2019/01/23/the-windover-bog-bodies-among-the-greatest-archeological-discoveries-ever-unearthed-in-the-united-states/

[the1beardedgent]

BREVARD HISTORY: Windover's Ancient 'Bog People' Among Most Significant Archaeological Finds In North America - Space Coast Daily

...and they always say 'South Florida', but it's in Titusville folks, Titusville, in Central Florida.

[the1beardedgent]

Titusville, Florida  ...an 8000 year old cemetery with over 150 bodies buried in a bog. Supposedly the DNA tests showed these people were of European descent, not American Indians, which was expected.