in 2016 a diver searching for shark teeth in the Gulf of Mexico came across a tooth of another type, a human molar, attached to a jawbone. It was not a crime scene but an archaeological find.
The diver, once aware of what he had found, took the sample to the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research (FBAR). The next step was organize an underwater expedition to explore the find site.
What they found in successive expeditions during 2016 and 2017 was a small necropolis, with human remains, textiles and stakes. Little is known about the people who buried their dead in this place, but experts were able to date it to the late archaic perioda time of transition between nomadic hunter-gatherer societies and the appearance of the first settlements linked to agriculture. Little else is known about this culture.
The experts did not have a difficult time determining what type of cemetery the newly discovered was since it was not the first one found in the American state, and the stakes were probably key in this regard.
Thanks to anthropology and archeology we know how much funerary rites vary from one place to another and from one time to another. Mummifications, cremations and burials are the first that may come to mind, but the diversity is enormous. And proof of this is the curious funerary rites of Florida, where the burial had taken place not underground but under the water of a swamp.
What exactly were these burials and why the stakes? In the words of Ryan Dugginsof the FBAR, “what we currently think is that when an individual died, they would have wrapped him in hand woven fibers and sunk to the bottom of the swamp. A series of sharp, fire-hardened stakes would have been driven into the swamp bed around the body with the tops protruding above the water line.”
The first discovery of a necropolis of this type was made and 1982 and Windover, near Cape Canaveral. This necropolis was dated around the year 6280 before our era. They were found in it 168 graves and a total of 10,000 “human elements”making it the largest known cemetery in America of its time.
But there is still more. The method of using swamps as the final resting place of the bodies implied a greater facility for the preservation of tissues in the corpses. Although the muscle tissue was lost, archaeologists found something even more important: 91 of the skulls had their brains intact.
Although the use of stakes instead of niches seems unique to Florida Native Americans, similar findings They have also been made in Europe. The European cases of burials in swamps, although more recent, have been kept in a better state of preservation. In these cases, the remains date back to the first millennium before our era, that is, several millennia after the Florida necropolises.
Almost 35 years passed between the discovery of Windover and the discovery of the Gulf of Mexico. This implied a change in the attitude of the authorities and the descendants of the pre-Columbian peoples. The archaeologists of the 1980s had a certain degree of “wide sleeve” when doing their surveys.
The authorities in charge of studying the funerary site under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico in contact with the Seminoles of the state of Florida to seek advice on the correct treatment of the human remains found, as well as the rest of the objects possibly associated with their funeral rites.
“Even given the archaeological importance of this site, it is crucial that this place and the people buried there are treated with the utmost sensitivity and respect.” Timothy Parsons noted, from the Florida Department of State. “The people buried at the site are ancestors of the living indigenous peoples of the Americas. Sites like this have cultural and religious significance in the present.”
The balance between archaeological exploration and respect for ancestral cultures is complex and is not limited to the American context (not even tombs). And it is that how we prepare the dead for their journey to the “beyond” tells us a lot. Among other things, whether or not we believe in that hypothetical life after death.
Image | Florida Department of State / Glen Doran