Treasures in the Mud
A sunken fleet of prehistoric canoes—the largest such discovery—emerges in a dry Florida lakebed
By Jad Davenport | Online Only | Mar. 29, 2002
Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research crew took GPS location and wood samples, then covered canoes again.
Credit: Florida Division of Historical Resources
On a muggy Florida morning two years ago, Eastside High School teacher Steve Everett and some of his environmental-science students were hiking the north shore of Newnan’s Lake eight miles east of Gainesville. A drought had partially drained the shallow, 7,000-acre body of water. Heading to the remains of a 19th-century logging camp for an environmental history field project, the group skirted the dry edge of the lakebed.
"All of a sudden, one of the students noticed a funny pattern of holes, like stippling, on the sandy lake bottom," Everett remembers. "The stippling seemed to outline the shape of a canoe. We started gently digging around the outline. Sure enough, the rim of an ancient canoe emerged."
Stumbling across an old canoe in a dry lake isn’t unheard of, says state archaeologist Jim Miller. "In any given year, we might have reports of two to six canoes." When Miller heard about the discovery at Newnan’s Lake, he sent a team of archaeologists to investigate. What happened next surprised everyone.
Led by state archaeologists, Everett and his class returned to the exposed lakebed to begin a survey. "We had a giant Easter egg hunt," he says. "People were hollering, ‘I found one!’ ‘I found two!’" By summer’s end, more than 100 canoes were documented—55 of them were excavated, mapped, and photographed. Everett’s class had stumbled across the largest single discovery of aboriginal canoes ever recorded in North America. Experts now believe there may be more than 200 canoes buried in the silt and sand at the bottom of Newnan’s Lake, which the Seminoles called Pithlachocco, which means "where boats are made."
The canoes range in length from 15 to 31 feet. All but one were hewn from pine trees, common in the thick forests surrounding the shore. The exception is a single canoe made from bald cypress. The boat makers burned out the interior of a log and then chipped away the remaining wood with axes. Several canoes are intact in the mud, but most have deteriorated.
Radio-carbon dating of wood samples revealed three distinct time periods. "The oldest group of canoes is between 5,000 and 3,000 years old," says Roy Hunt, special advisor for the state. "Another group was dated at about 2,500 years, and the third group is from 500 to 1,300 years old."
Chairman and Representatives of Seminole Nation of Oklahoma visited Newnan's Lake last year to view canoe remains.
Credit: Florida Division of Historical Resources
Hunt has visited the site with delegations of Native Americans who want to learn more about the discovery. Patricia Wickman, historic preservation officer for the Seminole Tribe of Florida, says radiocarbon dating might prove Seminole claims that they inhabited Florida long before the arrival of Europeans. Current textbooks suggest the Seminoles were chased out of Alabama and Georgia in the 18th and 19th centuries and settled a relatively uninhabited peninsula.
The discovery is an opportunity to learn more about the role of transportation in ancient cultures that inhabited the region, Miller says. "In pre-European society," he says, "there were no wheeled vehicles, no beasts of burden. Anything you transported, you transported on your back or by boat. The dugout canoe allowed people to travel and trade throughout the region."
Why are so many canoes in one lake? Like cars, says Miller, canoes have a certain life span; they become waterlogged and sink. "Was this lake a canoe factory or graveyard?" he asks. Perhaps the density is simply a function of time. "Consider this as an accumulation of several canoes per century over 5,000 years," Miller says. "The number of canoes per decade is not unreasonable."
Because of the canoes are fragile, they have been reburied in the mud and sand of Newnan’s Lake to protect them. What the lakebed can’t protect against, though, are the steel treads of bulldozers. Shortly after the canoe discovery, L.C. Pinson of Santa Rosa Beach—with a permit from the state environmental protection department—drove a bulldozer over the lakebed while "deadhead logging" on the lakebed, says Melissa Memory, a former state archaeologist for the state department of historical resources. Deadhead loggers harvest pine and cypress trees that were chopped down during the heyday of Florida logging several decades ago and later sank in lakes, rivers, and swamps. Preserved underwater, logs sell for as much as $3,000 each.
After archaeologists and Gainesville residents raised the alarm, Gov. Jeb Bush (R) halted the logging and asked the department of environmental protection to end deadhead logging on all Florida lakes, a ban that remains in effect. Last month, Alachua County imposed its own year-long ban on logging in Newnan’s Lake.
Coincidentally, Steve Everett’s class discovered the canoes in the process of studying early logging camps. These days, Everett and his students are trying to stop a new round of logging. "Just three weeks ago, the county commission established a year-long moratorium in response to yet another petition to log the lake," he says. His class is now studying the sunken logs in the lake and nearby streams to support the governor’s plan to ban deadhead logging.
For Everett, it’s a personal mission. "Finding something like this, seeing all these canoes—the significance doesn’t hit you until you look back and realize how many of them are out there." Everett believes there are many more canoes waiting to be unearthed if the logging can be stopped on the two-mile-long canoe site, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places last March. "I just think back to those days after we found the first one," he says. "We just walked back and forth across the lakebed. We kept finding them and finding them. They were everywhere."
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