Exploring the Eternal
Suwannee River
by Mark Renz
(Scroll down for photos)
More than any other Florida river, I have always longed to become intimate with the
Suwannee. Born at least 12,000 years ago in Georgia’s immense Okefenokee Swamp ,
this most gorgeous of waterways has carved a winding path for 213 miles through
sediments of solid limestone rock, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico on Florida’s West
coast. In the process, it has become a home and a habitat for hundred’s of generations of
man and beast.
At the close of the last Ice Age, our blue planet was somewhat cooler and more of the
world’s oceans were locked up in the Poles as vast frozen continents. Sea levels were
200 feet lower. There was no Suwannee then. The lower sea levels left the state of
Florida with nearly double the amount of exposed dry land. The region was sprinkled
with clear, bubbly springs, many of which connected underground. When the ice began
to melt and the Florida peninsula shrank, the springs were connected above ground as well,
many of them feeding into the Suwannee as tributaries.
My first encounter with this remarkable river was liken to a Rolling Stones fan meeting
Mick Jagger for the first time and getting invited to sit in and jam with the band. I was
star-struck and speechless. A good friend had invited me to don a few tanks of air and
dive back to a time when humans were truly living off the land, when hunting was a
necessity not a sport.
Before I even got two hundred feet from the river, I was recording everything with my
camera. The brilliant red and yellow leaves changing with the fall, something I don’t see
much further south where I live near Fort Myers. A rustic cabin tucked away in the
woods. The ground covered like a brown crunchy carpet with dead leaves. The river
itself was a good 25 feet below me, separated by massive slabs of limestone, some the
size of my van. A white mist was slowly rising from the water as if pulling back the
sheets to waken the river for the start of a new day.
My friend entered the water a few hundred feet upriver from me. I choose the easiest
access to the middle of the river from the side that had a beach. It’s a good thing I wasn’t
fishing. The way I tromped through the shallows wearing flippers larger than any
clown’s footwear, I surely would have chased away any living creature swimming within
a mile of me. Unless, of course, it was a gator, which—with my uncanny luck—I
probably would have attracted.
But I doubted any gators would be stirring. The outside temperature was 28 degrees. I
was also wearing a thick wetsuit and hood that would have kept me warm in the
Antarctic. The insulated suit meant I was more buoyant, so I had at least 50 pounds of
weights around my waste and tucked into my suit.
Fifty feet from shore, in four feet of water, I leaned slowly forward and dropped to the
bottom. Instant silence. I adjusted and cleared my mask, then laid on the bottom and
began a slow descent to…all of 12 feet. That was fine. Normally, a deep water dive for
me is five feet. Diving is fun, but for the fossil hunting I usually do, a tank is the means,
not the end.
In one gloved hand I had my trusty fossil bag and in the other I had a not so trusty dive
light. Visibility was excellent, about 10 feet, but the light would still help for this hunt.
Yes, I was interested in fossils, but I was exploring a part of Florida that is known more
for its record of early man—the tools and weapons that were part of his (and her) ancient
world.
All I saw was sand and an occasional rock until I got out to the middle. There, the
bottom was littered with modern artifacts—better known as trash. I saw broken beer
bottles, loose fishing line and cracked car batteries, signs of an upright species that
appears to have regressed rather than evolved.
Between the rubble, I came across football-size chunks of chert, a flint-like stone. I kept
turning the chunks over and gently fanning under them, down through the sandy bottom.
Smaller and smaller flakes were wedged between the larger stones.
I fanned harder until I hit a solid limestone bottom. Moving over a few feet, I fanned
again and instead of a limestone bottom, I hit a brown, packed powder, containing black
flakes of flint and rock, as well as small fragments of brown and black bones. I loosened
the packed powder with a chunk of flint and fanned some more.
Suddenly, I could see it partially wedged in the sand, a small, beautifully crafted spear tip
or knife blade known as a Kirk quarter notch. By style, Kirks may be the earliest truly
stemmed points in Florida, dating back to about 5500 B.C.
I shivered, but not from being cold. Anyone who has found a tool or a projectile point
made by a human thousands of years before Christ was born, has undoubtedly felt the
same sense of time passage. On a smaller time scale, I have watched an old Jimmy
Stewart movie when he was in his 20s, knowing he recently died in his 80s, and been
amazed at how quickly his life had unfolded. Mine too, was uunfolding fast. This small, three-
dimensional piece of history just helped to put things in perspective for me.
I turned the point over and over in my hand, studying its superb craftsmanship. Hunting
bands would have preferred to camp by a river or a spring to ambush prey that came to
drink. Was the point used to kill prey or another human? Or, was it left behind in a
Paleo toolbox when the owner moved on, much the way we might accidentally leave
some of our old tools in the house when we move into a new one? Was it made at this
exact location from local material or was it brought here from ten, a hundred or a
thousand miles away? Who made it? A man, a woman, a child? How long did it take?
Was a deer antler used for the final touches? How had it been lost?
I continued fanning, working my way upriver while covering an area about 10 feet wide.
In the two hours I was under, I found I had barely moved two feet forward. During that
time, I found another broken point I couldn’t identify, several hammer stones and a
Waller crafted scraper-knife.
The Waller knife was named after the late Ben Waller, a veteran Florida river diver, who
first brought the artifacts to the attention of archaeologists. Waller knifes are unifacial,
side-notched knives or scrapers, crafted between 12,000 and 6,000 B.C, making them
among the oldest Florida artifacts.
Until 10-12,000 years ago, Paleoindians killed the largest of our state’s mammals: giant
ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, bison and horses. A Waller knife would have
been ideal for removing hides or slicing meat into small portions. The knife also may
have been used for cutting vegetables since plants were thought to be the biggest portion
of the native diet. From 6,000 years to present, deer was probably the preferred big game.
Variation of Kirk-serrated point - 5500 B.C.
Also in the same layer as the Waller knife, were broken manatee or dugong ribs, as well
as deer bones. The ribs were fossilized and it was difficult to tell which sea cow they
came from. Although the dugong is found elsewhere in the world, it became extinct in
Florida about two and a half million years ago. That means it would have lived at a time
when the state was entirely covered by shallow seas, long before any human occupation.
If the bones were from a manatee though, the animal could
have died anywhere from 2-1/2 million to the last 1,000 years. There were also
occasional ancient horse teeth and shark teeth from a species that hasn’t lived in Florida
for over 24 million years. Because our state has been land, then ocean, countless times, it
makes sense that fossils and artifacts can get mixed together.
Two days later, my friend and I returned to the site and I continued where I left off.
Again, I found more variations of Kirk-serrated points, knives, scrapers and hammer
stones.
When my last dive was over and I surfaced, I hated to go ashore. The Suwanne had
offered me a rare glimpse into its past lives and for that I was grateful.
How important are river bottom sites? Because Florida’s rivers flow so slowly to the sea, most projectile points and other chert
tools remain where they were last dropped—whether by an ancient hand or washing out
of a bank. For this reason, it’s important to report your finds to state archaeologists and
let them know specifically where you found them.
Keep in mind that in Florida, it’s the law that you report the finding of isolated artifacts
within 30 days. The State then, has 90 days in which to determine if the artifact might in
someway benefit archaeology. The fear of course, is that if you report it, it might be
taken from you or someone else may know about your “secret” spot. That could happen.
But in my personal experience, the state has never asked for any of the points I reported.
Overall, the State just appears to want to keep track of what’s being found and where it’s
being found. The more information we amateurs can provide them, the easier it will be
for them to make sense of Florida’s fascinating past.
Photos and details of your artifact finds should be sent to Isolated Finds, Bureau of
Archaeological Research, R.A. Gray Building, Room 312, 300 South Bronough Street,
Tallahassee, FL 32399-0250. Phone: (850) 487-2299.
For collecting fossils, it’s a whole different matter. Questions in that regard should be
directed to Russ McCarty, Program of Vertebrate Paleontology, Florida Museum of
Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. Phone: 352-392-1721 or e-
mail at cormac@flmnh.ufl.edu.
The eternal Suwannee River
Fall on the Suwannee
A rustic cabin nestled along the banks of the Suwannee
Kirk Serrated Quarter-Notch - 5,500 B.C.
Variation of Kirk Serrated point - 5,500 B.C.
Waller Knife, 11,000 B.C.
Variation of Kirk Serrated point - 5,500 B.C.
Knife - Possible variation of Kirk point
Possible Preform, which would have been worked
into a projectile point or knife.
Scraper used for removing animal
hides or slicing meat.
Hammerstone or chopper, age unknown.
Scraper used removing animal
hides or slicing meat.
An ancestor of C. megalodon known as C. angustidens or C. turgidus.
Note side cusps on root and serrations on tooth.
Lived in North Florida from 35 to 22 million years ago.
Raccoon tracks on their way to becoming a fossil imprint.
Farewell and thankyou to the Suwannee.
(Scroll down for photos)
More than any other Florida river, I have always longed to become intimate with the Suwannee. Born at least 12,000 years ago in Georgia’s immense Okefenokee Swamp , this most gorgeous of waterways has carved a winding path for 213 miles through sediments of solid limestone rock, emptying into the Gulf of Mexico on Florida’s West coast. In the process, it has become a home and a habitat for hundred’s of generations of man and beast.
At the close of the last Ice Age, our blue planet was somewhat cooler and more of the world’s oceans were locked up in the Poles as vast frozen continents. Sea levels were 200 feet lower. There was no Suwannee then. The lower sea levels left the state of Florida with nearly double the amount of exposed dry land. The region was sprinkled with clear, bubbly springs, many of which connected underground. When the ice began to melt and the Florida peninsula shrank, the springs were connected above ground as well, many of them feeding into the Suwannee as tributaries.
My first encounter with this remarkable river was liken to a Rolling Stones fan meeting Mick Jagger for the first time and getting invited to sit in and jam with the band. I was star-struck and speechless. A good friend had invited me to don a few tanks of air and dive back to a time when humans were truly living off the land, when hunting was a necessity not a sport.
Before I even got two hundred feet from the river, I was recording everything with my camera. The brilliant red and yellow leaves changing with the fall, something I don’t see much further south where I live near Fort Myers. A rustic cabin tucked away in the woods. The ground covered like a brown crunchy carpet with dead leaves. The river itself was a good 25 feet below me, separated by massive slabs of limestone, some the size of my van. A white mist was slowly rising from the water as if pulling back the sheets to waken the river for the start of a new day.
My friend entered the water a few hundred feet upriver from me. I choose the easiest access to the middle of the river from the side that had a beach. It’s a good thing I wasn’t fishing. The way I tromped through the shallows wearing flippers larger than any clown’s footwear, I surely would have chased away any living creature swimming within a mile of me. Unless, of course, it was a gator, which—with my uncanny luck—I probably would have attracted.
But I doubted any gators would be stirring. The outside temperature was 28 degrees. I was also wearing a thick wetsuit and hood that would have kept me warm in the Antarctic. The insulated suit meant I was more buoyant, so I had at least 50 pounds of weights around my waste and tucked into my suit.
Fifty feet from shore, in four feet of water, I leaned slowly forward and dropped to the bottom. Instant silence. I adjusted and cleared my mask, then laid on the bottom and began a slow descent to…all of 12 feet. That was fine. Normally, a deep water dive for me is five feet. Diving is fun, but for the fossil hunting I usually do, a tank is the means, not the end.
In one gloved hand I had my trusty fossil bag and in the other I had a not so trusty dive light. Visibility was excellent, about 10 feet, but the light would still help for this hunt. Yes, I was interested in fossils, but I was exploring a part of Florida that is known more for its record of early man—the tools and weapons that were part of his (and her) ancient world.
All I saw was sand and an occasional rock until I got out to the middle. There, the bottom was littered with modern artifacts—better known as trash. I saw broken beer bottles, loose fishing line and cracked car batteries, signs of an upright species that appears to have regressed rather than evolved.
Between the rubble, I came across football-size chunks of chert, a flint-like stone. I kept turning the chunks over and gently fanning under them, down through the sandy bottom. Smaller and smaller flakes were wedged between the larger stones.
I fanned harder until I hit a solid limestone bottom. Moving over a few feet, I fanned again and instead of a limestone bottom, I hit a brown, packed powder, containing black flakes of flint and rock, as well as small fragments of brown and black bones. I loosened the packed powder with a chunk of flint and fanned some more.
Suddenly, I could see it partially wedged in the sand, a small, beautifully crafted spear tip or knife blade known as a Kirk quarter notch. By style, Kirks may be the earliest truly stemmed points in Florida, dating back to about 5500 B.C.
I shivered, but not from being cold. Anyone who has found a tool or a projectile point made by a human thousands of years before Christ was born, has undoubtedly felt the same sense of time passage. On a smaller time scale, I have watched an old Jimmy Stewart movie when he was in his 20s, knowing he recently died in his 80s, and been amazed at how quickly his life had unfolded. Mine too, was uunfolding fast. This small, three- dimensional piece of history just helped to put things in perspective for me.
I turned the point over and over in my hand, studying its superb craftsmanship. Hunting bands would have preferred to camp by a river or a spring to ambush prey that came to drink. Was the point used to kill prey or another human? Or, was it left behind in a Paleo toolbox when the owner moved on, much the way we might accidentally leave some of our old tools in the house when we move into a new one? Was it made at this exact location from local material or was it brought here from ten, a hundred or a thousand miles away? Who made it? A man, a woman, a child? How long did it take? Was a deer antler used for the final touches? How had it been lost?
I continued fanning, working my way upriver while covering an area about 10 feet wide. In the two hours I was under, I found I had barely moved two feet forward. During that time, I found another broken point I couldn’t identify, several hammer stones and a Waller crafted scraper-knife.
The Waller knife was named after the late Ben Waller, a veteran Florida river diver, who first brought the artifacts to the attention of archaeologists. Waller knifes are unifacial, side-notched knives or scrapers, crafted between 12,000 and 6,000 B.C, making them among the oldest Florida artifacts.
Until 10-12,000 years ago, Paleoindians killed the largest of our state’s mammals: giant ground sloths, mammoths, mastodons, bison and horses. A Waller knife would have been ideal for removing hides or slicing meat into small portions. The knife also may have been used for cutting vegetables since plants were thought to be the biggest portion of the native diet. From 6,000 years to present, deer was probably the preferred big game. Variation of Kirk-serrated point - 5500 B.C.
Also in the same layer as the Waller knife, were broken manatee or dugong ribs, as well as deer bones. The ribs were fossilized and it was difficult to tell which sea cow they came from. Although the dugong is found elsewhere in the world, it became extinct in Florida about two and a half million years ago. That means it would have lived at a time when the state was entirely covered by shallow seas, long before any human occupation.
If the bones were from a manatee though, the animal could have died anywhere from 2-1/2 million to the last 1,000 years. There were also occasional ancient horse teeth and shark teeth from a species that hasn’t lived in Florida for over 24 million years. Because our state has been land, then ocean, countless times, it makes sense that fossils and artifacts can get mixed together.
Two days later, my friend and I returned to the site and I continued where I left off. Again, I found more variations of Kirk-serrated points, knives, scrapers and hammer stones.
When my last dive was over and I surfaced, I hated to go ashore. The Suwanne had offered me a rare glimpse into its past lives and for that I was grateful.
How important are river bottom sites? Because Florida’s rivers flow so slowly to the sea, most projectile points and other chert tools remain where they were last dropped—whether by an ancient hand or washing out of a bank. For this reason, it’s important to report your finds to state archaeologists and let them know specifically where you found them.
Keep in mind that in Florida, it’s the law that you report the finding of isolated artifacts within 30 days. The State then, has 90 days in which to determine if the artifact might in someway benefit archaeology. The fear of course, is that if you report it, it might be taken from you or someone else may know about your “secret” spot. That could happen. But in my personal experience, the state has never asked for any of the points I reported.
Overall, the State just appears to want to keep track of what’s being found and where it’s being found. The more information we amateurs can provide them, the easier it will be for them to make sense of Florida’s fascinating past.
Photos and details of your artifact finds should be sent to Isolated Finds, Bureau of Archaeological Research, R.A. Gray Building, Room 312, 300 South Bronough Street, Tallahassee, FL 32399-0250. Phone: (850) 487-2299.
For collecting fossils, it’s a whole different matter. Questions in that regard should be directed to Russ McCarty, Program of Vertebrate Paleontology, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611. Phone: 352-392-1721 or e- mail at cormac@flmnh.ufl.edu.
The eternal Suwannee River
Fall on the Suwannee
A rustic cabin nestled along the banks of the Suwannee
Kirk Serrated Quarter-Notch - 5,500 B.C.
Variation of Kirk Serrated point - 5,500 B.C.
Waller Knife, 11,000 B.C.
Variation of Kirk Serrated point - 5,500 B.C.
Knife - Possible variation of Kirk point
Possible Preform, which would have been worked
into a projectile point or knife.
Scraper used for removing animal
hides or slicing meat.
Hammerstone or chopper, age unknown.
Scraper used removing animal
hides or slicing meat.
An ancestor of C. megalodon known as C. angustidens or C. turgidus.
Note side cusps on root and serrations on tooth.
Lived in North Florida from 35 to 22 million years ago.
Raccoon tracks on their way to becoming a fossil imprint.
Farewell and thankyou to the Suwannee.