A JAR FULL OF LOVE LETTERS AND OTHER ADVENTURES IN TAMPA ARCHAEOLOGY
Recent archaeological work in downtown Tampa focused on parts of former Fort Brooke, an important military installation from the Period of Indian Removal in early American Florida. The work uncovered the location of the fort’s lost cemetery, buried under a tangle of city streets and utilities in the shadow of the hockey arena. Excavations unintentionally unearthed a glass swing-top jar stuffed full of love letters written in 1916. The letters were written to the captain of Clarence Bloomfield Moore’s archaeological research vessel, the steamer Gopher. This presentation will discuss the letters, their author, and their recipient, who was a long-time resident and amateur scientist of early Tampa, as well as some findings from other excavations at Fort Brooke.
Eric Prendergast, M.A., RPA. Senior Staff Archaeologist with Cardno. Eric is a transplant from the northeast who has only lived in Tampa since 2012, when he came to graduate school at USF. Since then he has worked in CRM and has recently served as Principal Investigator for major excavations in Downtown Tampa and for the Zion Cemetery Project, Robles Park Village.
INFO FOR THIS 7PM ZOOM PRESENTATION
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Meeting ID: 881 2568 2430 Passcode: 9LixDD or 334427
New College of Florida undergraduate student and WMS/LSSAS member Michelle Calhoun will be the speaker at our April 14 meeting. Her topic, “A Preliminary Analysis of Columella Tools and Gastropod Hammers from Snake Island, Sarasota County, Florida (8So2336).
Few newcomers to Sarasota County would know that the Rosemary District in Sarasota was once known as Overtown and part of the original plat of the Town of Sarasota in 1885. Beginning in the 1890’s African Americans settled there. It was north just north of downtown Sarasota and known as “Black Bottom,” later to be change to Overtown in the mid-1920s. It was a vibrant community with a rich history to many of its residents and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a Historic District in 2003. It became officially named the Rosemary District in honor of the Rosemary Cemetery, established in 1886 and a historic marker was first dedicated there in 1985.
Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) Assistant Professor, William Locascio, will be the speaker at our February 11 meeting. His topic will cover recent excavations by his FGCU students in the Everglades Agricultural Area. He has shown that the Everglades was inhabited for thousands of years in the Archaic Period and was not a sterile, uninhabited area as many have postulated. His work there is changing how we view the prehistoric populations and their subsistence base. He views his research as a way to teach the next generation of archaeologists and advance archaeological knowledge of this region, which reveals remains of life among the people that settled the region over three thousand years ago.
Upon retiring to Charlotte County in 2016, author Ted Ehmann was curious why after over twenty-five years of researching and visiting the Indian mounds of the Hopewell and Mississippian cultures of North America, there was not one mention of the Calusa and the mound building cultures in Charlotte Harbor and the entire south Florida Region. He claims, the Calusa and their neighbors have received very little archaeological investigations. Ehmann argues that the evidence reveals that the mound-building epoch in south Florida and the hunter-gathering societies responsible constitute a unique cultural epoch spanning twenty-five centuries, and is of global importance. Ehmann applies new models and connects the archaeological record to an earlier epoch in Louisiana, the latter epochs of the Hopewell and Mississippian mound builders, and the research by archaeologists outside of Florida.