Sun Sentinel Online
December 21, 2015
Vero Beach Dig Site May Rewrite Florida's History
In the heart of the Treasure Coast, a team of archeologists is poring over a 14,000-year-old site that could completely rewrite the prehistory of the state and, to some extent, the prehistory of humankind in the New World.
But it took a last-minute intervention by Florida Atlantic University to assure The Old Vero Man site would be around to reveal its mysteries.
The dig's story began a century ago, with the Indian River Farms Company dredging a canal in a backwater called Vero in 1913 — the actual town of Vero Beach wouldn't exist for another six years. The dredging turned up old bones and other artifacts, which in turn drew the attention of state geologist Elias Sellards. He excavated over the next couple years, turning up more evidence of ancient human habitation.
Given the depth of the artifacts and the layers of rock around them, Sellards put human habitation in the area at 14,000 years ago, and was promptly laughed out of the archaeology business.
Back then, the prevailing thought was that people hadn't been in America before the last Ice Age, had not coexisted in the New World with mammoths, mastodons and other now-extinct Ice Age animals. A few decades later, in the 1930s, arrowheads and other artifacts from what experts called the Clovis culture meant that people had been in America some 11,000 years ago — still not ancient enough for Sellards' theory to hold water.
And so the Old Vero Man site sat largely untouched as Vero Beach grew up around it. It now sits on the south side of the Vero Beach Regional Airport.
In 2009, a proposed storm-water system would have dumped 200 tons of concrete on the site. That's when the Old Vero Ice Age Sites Committee was formed to make sure construction wouldn't destroy a valuable window into antiquity. They found enough to halt construction, but committee chair Randy Old needed to bring in an expert to do the serious digging.
"Because the site had this stigma of was it real or not, we had to get someone in here to do excavation that was beyond reproach," Old said. "So I started asking around, 'If you were going to choose an archaeologist for this site, who would you choose?' And everyone in the field said Jim Adovasio. I asked for second or third choices, and most of the time, the answer was. 'Don't bother.'"
With his squinty gaze, close-cropped gray beard and predilection for safari wear, Jim Adovasio looks like some Hemingway-esque idea of what a rugged field archaeologist should be. And yet, Adovasio has done far more than most in his field to reexamine the role of women in prehistory. He is one of the foremost experts on ancient basketry and textiles in the world, and has written books positing that women are responsible for rope, fishing nets, a great deal of language development — civilization, in other words.
Adovasio also played a large role in overturning the Clovis-came-first idea — the Old Vero Man site is not his first that stretches back more than 11,000 years. Adovasio also worked an area in Pennsylvania that showed humans were there before the Clovis culture could possibly have arrived, and a few more have been found in both North and South America.
