Coastal History and Cartography:

The history of the Broward County coastal area is closely linked with the wider maritime history of the New Bahama Channel, now known as the Straits of Florida, as well as with the native people that were indigenous to the peninsula, and later the early white settlers who made South Florida their home in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the era of Menendez in the mid sixteenth century, the coastal zone marine environment, lying between the Florida Current and the eastern peninsula, became the route of choice south from St. Augustine. This littoral current, flowing south only when an eddy goes by, was described by Menendez in 1565, in a letter to the Spanish monarch, Philip II. Bernard Romans in his Sailing Directions of 1775 more explicitly described the bottom conditions and coastal relief. The survey area described and investigated in this study lies within an area of historic navigation and has the potential to contain historic shipwrecks and associated cultural materials.

            The historic topography that now constitutes modern Broward County remained, until the massive drainage projects of Napoleon Bonaparte Broward in the early twentieth century, physically similar to southeast Florida as discovered by Spanish explorers in the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Until the land reclamation projects that began on the New River in 1906, the southeast peninsula consisted of coastal estuarine wetlands and the extensive Everglades region lying south of Lake Okeechobee. Along the half mile of upland that ran along the eastern coastline was a narrow elevated strip that consisted of a relic reef foundation and drifted sand uplands. Sites along the coastal ridge at the mouths of the Miami River, New River, Hillsboro Inlet, Lake Worth, and Loxahatchee River at Jupiter Inlet - were first populated by the pre-Columbian, and later by the Indians of the historic era. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries these locations, situated on biologically fertile, river estuary systems, became the sites of the first white settlements. East of the coastal uplands was a narrow zone of water and wetlands that separated the barrier islands from the greater peninsula. This natural waterway was only partially navigable until the twentieth century when the Arm Corps of Engineers dredged these wetlands to form the present Intracoastal Waterway System.

            To better understand the potential for cultural resources to be found in the survey area a short review of Broward County coastal history has been undertaken. The intent of this review is to document the importance of historic Broward County as a maritime community, strategically located on a route of passage important to all the trading nations of the world. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Spanish, French, English and Dutch vied for control of the Bahama Channels. Later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the balance of world power shifted and the coastal waters of Florida became important as the new Republic of the United States consolidated power in the territories of Louisiana and Texas. In the nineteenth century the coastal waters of Florida served as the primary route to supply U.S. forces in the Seminole Wars, the Civil War, and at the turn of the century, the Spanish American War in Cuba and the Philippines.

The Prehistoric Era

            The prehistoric peoples who inhabited the Florida peninsula exhibited a pattern of cultural continuity that evolved slowly over the past ten thousand years; then in the era three thousand B.C. the culture of the pre-Columbian native people of Florida experienced a period of cultural elaboration and diversification. This period of change lasted until the sixteenth century and the arrival of European explorers and the settlers who later established a permanent presence on the northeast peninsula at St. Augustine in 1565. A generally accepted framework for the pre-historic periods in Florida is:

Paleo-Indian Period - 10,000 - 7,000 B. C

Archaic, with Early, Middle and Late Periods - 7.000 - 1,5000 B. C.

Transitional Period - 1,500 to 500 B. C.

Three Glades Periods- a Glades III from 1200 to 1566

Historic Period - 1566 to 1763

(after McGoun, 1993)

            During the Archaic Period of native development the prime accelerator for population growth and cultural change was the gradual warming of the continental climate at the end of the last Ice Age. In the thousand years from 3,500 to 2,500 B. C., the water table rose to the point where the present contours of the Florida peninsula were established. Over this period the boundaries of the Lake Okeechobee and Everglades wetlands systems became stabilized in their present location and configuration. The expanding system of coastal estuarine wetlands situated between the present barrier islands and the Florida peninsula became a primary area for habitation for the Florida native people. The combination of increased drainage from the wetter interior and the decrease in sea level rise led to the formation of brackish estuaries, mangrove forests, and tropical marine meadows, a rich coastal habitat capable of supporting ecologically well balanced animal and human communities (Widmer, 1988).

            Three types of native living sites predominate in the prehistoric period. Large, multi-component cultural sites, that exhibit the remains of extensive middens and a wider range of tools and natural resource remains are always near wetlands and denote large primary living sites - or  villages. Smaller special use sites surround these primary sites and yet smaller sites throughout the peninsula, but their remains are generally concentrated in the coastal zone. Multi-component sites are usually located in association with shell mound complexes found at the mouths of coastal rivers and on the barrier islands. Examples of multi-component mound site complexes may be found at Jupiter Inlet at the mouth of the Loxahatchee River estuary system. Another good example of such a complex is Turtle Mound, on the barrier island north of Cape Canaveral (McGoun, 1993; Rouse, 1951; Widmer, 1988).

            The rapid settlement of the lower peninsula after the turn of the 20th century resulted in the loss of many of these mound complexes, which were utilized for road fill, or bulldozed flat to facilitate construction projects. The foundation of many local communities consists of this material; an existing example is the trailer park complex south of Jupiter Inlet. The Jupiter lighthouse, constructed north of the inlet in the mid nineteenth century, was also built on the remains of a prehistoric shell mound.

            In Broward County important examples of special  use prehistoric habitation sites have been discovered and excavated in the drained wetlands of central Broward County near the historic New River. Five such sites, Markham Park II, Taylor Head, Peach Camp, Rolling Oaks II, and Deep Fork, have been investigated by the Broward County Archaeological Society. These sites are located from just north of  the North New River Canal, to a point, north of the South New River Canal. These modern canals were dredged in 1906, along the historic north and south branches of the New River, near the Pine Island cultural complex.

            This area has been described by local archaeologist, Gypsy Graves. “Topographically this central portion of Broward County is generally flat with numerous slight rises above the landscape. The soils are very poorly drained. The organic material is Dania muck - peat and residuals of decomposed saw grass - which overlies Miami oolite limestone. The hammocks are slightly elevated limestone rock deposits. To the east are the sandy flatlands, the Atlantic Coastal Ridge, Pine Island Ridge, and the coastal marshes and swamps. To the north and south lie the sawgrass marshes and the wet prairies of the Everglades. To the west lies the Big Cypress Swamp. The elevations of underlying rock vary between four and five feet above mean sea level with greater elevations to the northwest, northeast, and southwest. This central Broward County location is generally the lowest elevation inland along the great flow of fresh water south from above bedrock and the habitation sites are on hammocks rising two to five feet above the surrounding surface. The climate is semi - tropical with warm moist summers and mild winters. The periods of greater precipitation are in June and November. When water level decreases due to lack of precipitation, the organic soils dry out and fires are not uncommon. It is within the boundaries of this - Sea of Grass - and along the coast that the Tequesta lived, pursued the food quest, and flourished for several thousand years (Graves, 1982).”

            Upon concluding the excavations of the Rolling Oaks II Site it was the opinion of Ms. Graves that this site and the others were more than mere hunting camps; that they were semi – permanent, inter-related inland communities. Based on non ceramic artifacts and ceramic shards excavated, the sites were believed to date from the Late Archaic through the Glades Period. The term “semi permanent” may mean that the five central Broward sites were special use sites, which would also be supported by the fact that burials and extensive midden remains indicate prolonged occupation. In the words of Ms. Graves: “These sites represent a continuum of habitation sites of time. They are not villages in the same sense as the coastal settlements, but reflect a greater   occupation than mere hunting camps (Graves, 1982)”.

Spanish Colonial Era

            In 1513, Juan Ponce de Leon during his exploration of the Bahamas and search for the legendary Fountain of Youth made a landfall at some point along the central or lower southeast coast of Florida. This landing, to replenish water supplies, has been variously placed in what is present northern Palm Beach County or as far north as Martin County. What is known, however, is that the landing was contested by hostile Indians, and Ponce sailed on. This encounter with the natives was the beginning of a series of conflicts that would continue through the Seminole Wars of the nineteenth  century (Milanich, 1995).

            The east coast of Florida saw no permanent Spanish settlement until Pedro Menendez de Aviles founded St. Augustine in 1565. Later in the 1560’s, there were two reported massacres of the Spanish by coastal natives, and in 1565 Menendez attempted to establish a garrison somewhere between Jupiter and St. Lucie Inlets. However, due to hunger, mutiny, and the hostility of the local natives  (the Jega, or Ais), this attempt to garrison the lower peninsula failed (Lyon, 1990). In 1517, Hernandez de Cordova sailed up the west coast of Florida on a voyage of exploration and  Bernal Diaz recorded the first pitched battle between the Spanish and the warlike p