Windover (archaeological site)

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Coordinates: 28 ° 32 ′ 19 ″  N , 80 ° 50 ′ 36 ″  W.

Map: Florida
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Windover (archaeological site)​
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Florida

Windover (also Windover Bog or Windover archaeological site ) is an archaeological site near Cape Canaveral near Titusville in eastern Florida . In 1982 the remains of 168 bog corpses from the 6th millennium BC were found in the swamp near the Atlantic coast . Found. The Windover Bog is thus one of the most important archaeological moor find complexes. With the Bay West, Republic Groves and Little Salt Spring sites, it is one of only four known burial sites in ponds, known as bog burials , in North America . Parts of the finds are shown in the Brevard Museum of History and Natural Science in Cocoa .

Find place

The site was discovered in 1982 when a road was being built that was to cross the 5400 m² swamp towards the Windover Farms development area. An excavator operator noticed several skulls in the bucket of his machine. The summoned sheriff and the coroner found that they were historic burials. The developers Jack Eckerd and Jim Swann stopped the construction work on the water and called in archaeologists . They changed their construction plans to preserve the site, funded the first radiocarbon dating ( 14 C dating) and donated an additional US $ 60,000 for a pumping station to drain the water for the excavations. Funding for the excavation was secured in 1984. Three excavation campaigns followed in 1984, 1985 and 1986 under the direction of Glen Doran and David Dickel. Since the bottom of the swamp was between one and three meters below the current surface of the water, the groundwater level was lowered with a ring of 160 wells around the swamp to enable excavations in the peat to a depth of five meters. The burials occurred in and the corpses about 1.80 meters below the peat floor. About half of the swamp was excavated, the rest was left undisturbed for future research.

Findings

In prehistoric times there was an open lake at this point , which archaic Indians used as a burial place by fixing the deceased to the bottom of the lake with sticks and marking the place with stakes. The burials took place seasonally in summer and early autumn when the lake was low. The corpses deposited in the soft mud were largely preserved by silting up and excluding oxygen . The excavations revealed the remains of 168 men, women and children. The bones of some of the buried were displaced, whereas the skeletons of around 110 burials were undisturbed and still in the anatomically correct association. Most of the buried were lying on their left side in a crouched position , with their heads facing west and facing north; only two dead were buried in a stretched position, including a woman around 35 years old in a prone position. In some burials, textiles such as cloths or woven mats made from blades of grass in which the deceased were wrapped could be detected. Overall, there was no significant difference between the sexes and age groups. The radiocarbon dating ( 14 C-dating) carried out in 1982 on two bones from the finds revealed 7320 and 7210 years BP (which corresponds to about 5340 and 5230 BC). The burial place was in use for more than a thousand years. The strata profile of the Windoverteich has five horizons, which date between 10160 ± 120 years BP and 4790 ± 100 years BP. The burials occur in the middle horizon.

An associated storage or settlement site has not yet been proven. Another burial site for the Windover people for the first half of the year, when burials in the lake were not possible, has not yet been discovered.

Human remains

The remains found consist of men and women of all ages up to 60 years, with a high proportion of children being represented. The group of small children and adolescents formed the largest group among the buried with 39%. The group of over 40-year-olds had the next highest death rate. The mean life expectancy of the buried was 27.5 years. The men had an average height of 1.60 meters, the women were about 1.50 meters on average. Forensic examinations of the skeletons showed signs of disease and healed wounds. Investigations showed the occurrence of cribra orbitalia . Severe anemia was found in eight cases . The bones of many children showed stunted growth caused by serious illness or malnutrition ( Harris lines ), and older women regularly suffered from severe osteoporosis . Adults of both sexes have shown high incidence of osteoarthritis as a common condition among humans. Some skeletons had stigmas related to the probable cause of death. Only one man had a bony spearhead stuck in the pelvis with no signs of healing. Five individuals, including children, had severe skull fractures and, in some cases, injuries to the forearms due to defensive movements; in one man the injuries were premortal and still healed during his lifetime. Overall, however, the image of a non-warlike society emerges.

Buried children and adolescents were buried with a significantly larger number of grave goods than adults. Five of the skeletons examined showed signs of spina bifida . The skeleton of a boy suffering from spina bifida aperta (open vertebral gap) had extremely fragile bones. He was missing a foot and there were signs of healing on the stump of his lower leg. The condition of his spine suggests that the boy was paralyzed below his waist. These severe disabilities required enormous social commitment from the hunter-gatherer community in order to enable him to survive until the age of 15.

In late 1984, many skulls opened for examination were found to contain clumps of a greasy brownish substance that an archaeologist accidentally identified as brain tissue after a sample dropped on the floor. Examinations of intact skulls using X-rays , computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) confirmed the assumption and it was possible to depict recognizable brain structures. In addition, cell structures could be made visible under the microscope. In a total of 91 of the recovered corpses, remnants of brain tissue were still detectable, which had shrunk to about a third of its original size. The state of preservation of this tissue suggests that the deceased were buried within 24 to 48 hours after their death. DNA samples could be obtained from these oldest previously preserved brain tissues, the first results of which show no relationship with the present-day indigenous people of North America.

The remains of their last meals were preserved in the digestive tracts of many of the deceased. These leftovers included seeds from wild grapes, elderberries and large quantities of fruits from Opuntia ficus-indica . The death of the aforementioned 35-year-old woman, who was buried in the prone position, may have been due to poisoning from excessive consumption of elderberries, which is suggested by the approximately 3,000 elderberry seeds in her well-preserved stomach. People's dentition showed only a small amount of tooth decay , but teeth were very badly worn early on .

Additions

Many grave goods have been preserved from burials from Windover, which were laid with the dead in shallow water. A total of 86 textiles from 37 graves were recovered. Seven textile fabrics are addressed as possible parts of clothing. There are also other fabrics that are interpreted as parts of bags, mats, blankets and ponchos . Numerous other artifacts such as atlatls (spear throwers) and spearheads show that the early inhabitants hunted animals and collected plants. A bottle gourd found for food storage is the earliest evidence of vegetable storage containers from North America. They also included white-tailed deer , raccoons , possums , birds , fish and shellfish suggest in the graves to food suppliers, such as bones and shells. Other objects are decorated antler and bone implements. All plants related to the burials ripen in July to October, which is taken as evidence of seasonal use of the burial place.

literature

  • Thomas Brock: Bog bodies. Witness the . In: Archeology in Germany: special issue . Theiss, Stuttgart 2009, ISBN 978-3-8062-2205-0 , pp. 32 ff .
  • Robin C. Brown: Florida's First People . Pineapple Press Inc., Sarasota, Florida 1994, ISBN 1-56164-032-8 .
  • GH Doran; including: Anatomical, cellular and molecular analysis of 8,000-yr-old human brain tissue from the Windover archaeological site . In: Nature . No. 323 , 1986, ISSN  0028-0836 , pp. 803-806 .
  • Brian M. Fagan : Ancient North America . London and New York, Thames and Hudson Ltd, 1991, ISBN 0-500-27606-4 (also German: The early North America - Archeology of a continent , translated by Wolfgang Müller, Verlag CH Beck Munich 1993, ISBN 3-406-37245- 7 )
  • Ch. Hamlin: Sharing the Load: Gender and Task Division at the Windover Site . In: Bettina Arnold, Nancy L. Wicker (Eds.): Gender an the Archeology of Death . AltaMira Press, Walnut Creek, CA 2001, ISBN 0-7591-0136-1 , pp. 119-135 (English).
  • Jerald T. Milanich: Florida's Indians from Ancient Times to the Present . University Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL 1998, ISBN 0-8130-1599-5 (English).
  • Ch. Stojanowski, ua: Differential Skeletal Preservation at Windover Pond: causes and consequences . In: American Journal of Physical Anthropology . No. 119 . Wiley-Liss, 2002, ISSN  0002-9483 , pp. 15-26 (English).
  • T. Stonem et al: The Preservation and Conservation of Waterlogged Bone from the Windover Site, Florida: A Comparison of Methods . In: Journal of Field Archeology . No. 17/2 . University Press, 1990, ISSN  0093-4690 , pp. 177-186 (English).
  • N. Tuross, et al: Subsistence in the Florida Archaic: The stable-isotope and arcaeobotanical evidence from the Windover Site . In: Society for American Archeology (Ed.): American Antiquity . No. 59/2 , 1994, ISSN  0002-7316 , pp. 288-303 (English).
  • Rachel Kathleen Wentz: A Bioarchaeological assessment of health from Florida's Archaic: Application of the Western Hemisphere Health Index to the remains from Windover (8Br246) . Dissertation. The Florida State University, 2006 (English, online [PDF; 893 kB ; accessed on January 26, 2010]).
  • Rachel Kathleen Wentz, et al .: Gauging differential health among the sexes at Windover (8Br246) using the Western Hemisphere Health Index . In: Memórias do Instituto Oswaldo Cruz . No. 101 / II , 2006, ISSN  0074-0276 , p. 77-83 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Joseph L. Richardson: The Windover Archaeological Research Project. In: North Brevard Business & Community Directory. Dave Rich, accessed December 7, 2011 (English, detailed description).
  2. ↑ Cribia orbitalia is seen as the breakdown of the covering bone layer in the roof of the eye socket and has been observed in connection with anemia, infections and nutritional deficiencies from diarrhea and is caused by the body trying to make more red blood cells to compensate for the iron deficiency.
  3. ↑ David Glenn Smith, Ripan S. Malhi, Jason A. Eshleman, Frederika A. Kaestle, Brian M. Kemp: Mitochondrial DNA Haplogroups of Paleoamericans in North America . In: Robson Bonnichsen, Bradley T. Lepper, Dennis Stanford, Michael R. Waters (Eds.): Paleoamerican Origins: Beyond Clovis (Peopling of the Americas Publication) . Center for the Study of First Americans, 2006, ISBN 978-1-58544-540-0 , pp. 243–254 (English, online [PDF; 173 kB ; accessed on July 20, 2012]).