Still Finding Funny Bones

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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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