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Thursday, October 7, 2004
Mysteries laid bare along beach
By Donna Callea | News-Journal Staff Writer
DAYTONA BEACH — To date, there have been no reports of remnants of any ancient civilizations unearthed along the shoreline, courtesy of Charley, Frances and Jeanne.
Olympic discovery |
Atlantis, in other words, is still missing.
But like archaeologists gone wild, the recent hurricanes have done some heavy-duty digging hereabouts, turning large swaths of the beach into impromptu excavation sites.
In New Smyrna Beach, for example, the rusty skeleton of what seems to be a school bus is now free of the 10 or more feet of sand in which it lay hidden for who knows how long — prompting the curious to contemplate what manner of early Floridian would have left it there in the first place.
And all along what we still like to call the World's Most Famous Beach, newly revealed layers of old foundations — some of which look, to the untrained eye, like the remains of temples from previous beach-worshipping civilizations — serve as irrefutable evidence that modern "homo-vehicularis" (beach-driving man) was not the first hominid to get sand between his toes.
OK. So maybe it's a stretch to think of it as "paleo-Daytona Beach" revealed — paleo being the prefix used to denote something really, really, really old.
But it is true the storms have uncovered “parts of our recent, and in some cases, more distant past,” acknowledges Bob Carr, director of the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy in Davie. A hurricane, he says in a telephone interview, can be a “revealing event,” archaeologically speaking.
Foundations of buildings and trash-disposal methods are just the sorts of things archaeologists like to delve into, says Diane Kloetzer, Florida Archaeology collections manager at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.
“It’s certainly interesting,” she says in a telephone interview, that someone once disposed of a school bus in a New Smyrna Beach dune.
Which is not to say that professional archaeologists are suddenly rushing to our shores to see what the storms have wrought.
But they do point out that the whole state is an exceptionally rich place, archaeologically speaking, having attracted folks to its ever-shifting shores for about 12,000 years.
If you think Florida gets winter visitors now, imagine how attractive it must have been to people during the Ice Age, when it was colder here than we’re used to, but still a lot warmer than most other places — plus a whole lot less humid. The oceans were lower then, and a land bridge connected continents.
At one time, scientists say, Florida was about twice the size, land-wise, as it is now.
Mary Lopez Luellen can’t attest to that.
But the 86-year-old volunteer at the Halifax Historical Museum, who has lived on the beachside since she was 5, does fondly remember a time when the Daytona Beach oceanfront looked a whole lot different than it does now.
“I grew up around the pier,” says Luellen, in an era when the vast majority of tourists stayed in rooming houses rather than motels, and the only big building on the beach was the Clarendon Hotel (now the Plaza Resort & Spa).
Barely legible lettering on a formerly buried sea wall below what is now the Plaza’s parking lot reveals there was once an Olympic pool on the spot.
Luellen remembers it, as well as a big concrete swimming pool near the pier that she swam in as a child. Known as Pepp’s Pool, it was filled with pumped-in seawater.
“There are probably still some of those pipes,” she says, buried in the sand.
In Daytona Beach, the 1920s “small-town era” was followed by the Depression era, when, despite widespread financial ruin everywhere, the sand and the surf more or less stayed put.
Then, after World War II, came a “boom-time era” of building on the beach — mostly small motels, some of which are still standing, more or less, although others will likely become history as a result of the hurricanes.
“It makes me heartsick,” Luellen says, to see how the beach looks now.
But she and any archaeologist you care to ask will confirm that nothing stays looking the same forever.
Some might even say there’s a certain surreal beauty to the layers of history that have been exposed as a result of the hurricanes.
On a recent morning, Ed Alexander, a middle school science teacher from Sanford, prowled the beach with a long-handled sand scoop and a metal detector, looking for artifacts unearthed by the storms.
His finds, he says, include an old key, a fishing sinker and a pocket full of “real old, corroded coins” with hard-to-determine dates, although one penny appears to be from the 1970s.
“It’s a hobby,” he says — more of an “ecological service” (because he also picks up trash) than anything archaeological.
But whatever’s on the sand or beneath it, one thing’s not likely to change, according to Luellen.
Past, present or future, she says, “people want to be on that beach.”
Did You Know?
Though Rome and Greece are famous for their rich archaeological history, Volusia County has its own ancient artifacts.
* More than 100,000 years ago, giant ground sloths roamed the area. In 1975, the skeleton of one was discovered in a fossil site off Nova Road in South Daytona. When living, the sloth likely weighed 3 to 5 tons and ate about 300 pounds of plants each day. The 13-foot-tall skeleton has been on exhibit at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in since 1977.
* Sixteen sugar plantations were built between New Smyrna Beach and St. Augustine beginning in the late 1700s. Though some were destroyed during the Second Seminole Indian War of 1835, ruins still can be found in New Smyrna Beach and Flagler County.
SOURCES: www.moas.org, News-Journal archives
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