August 1985 find archaeologists
are digging holes everywhere.
The archaeologists are back,
or at least one. Off to your left and down from the pool, closer
to the tennis court, a man appears to be engaged in a salvage
excavation. He's standing at the edge of the dig and talking
into a hand-held dictation machine. He's just finished telling
the machine his name, Bill Marquardt and the date, August 1985.6*
"Four burials were uncovered as a result of a disturbance
created by a backhoe southeast of the Collier Inn. It measures
three point three meters square and eighty centimeters deep.
The excavation is littered with bone fragments from humans as
well as pottery. We had to work our way through a highly organic
upper layer made up of shells and humus. Below that, sixty to
seventy centimeters down, the sand went from dark grayish brown
to light brown containing a few oyster and clam shells that continued
until we reached the bottom of the excavation about twenty centimeters
further down. There we discovered the skeletal remains of a juvenile.
He was interred in the flexed position. The pottery looks to
be from the Caloosahatchee IIA period, or AD 500 to 800."
He clicks off the recorder, pauses and then clicks it back on
again. "One other note. Just below the surface we found
a champagne cork, a golf ball and a complete off-white Columbia
biface made of rock found in limestone most likely not indigenous
to the island."
6* Useppa was not
the only place digging up old stuff. Just the month before, Coca-Cola
dug up its old formula and threw out New Coke, and a Spanish
galleon that sank in 1622 was found forty miles off the coast
of Key West with $400 million in treasures.
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