Click the link below the picture
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X marked the spot. We were close.
That morning, a crew of diving archaeologists boarded a boat in the town of St. Marks, Florida, and steamed out to the Gulf of Mexico. As the sun rose and the morning fog lifted, the pontoon boat followed the winding St. Marks River through the mangroves. Alligators’ eyes sank into the brackish water as the boat chugged past, noisy herons took flight. On our right, we passed Fort San Marcos de Apalache, built by the Spanish in the 17th century at the confluence of the St. Marks and Wakulla Rivers. Over the centuries, the fort was burned, rebuilt, looted by pirates, occupied by the British, retaken by the Spanish, and later seized by Andrew Jackson, the seventh president of the United States. What had once been a commanding fortress, hurricanes, and history had eroded into an overgrown spit of jungle lined by boulders. Here and there, tall copses of pines and pond cypresses rose above the swamp; each one was likely an archaeological site with an oyster midden hidden at its base. This is the “real” Florida, as locals here in the Big Bend like to say, far from the glitz and glamor of Miami but rich in history.
I first met the archaeologists in the summer of 2021. Shawn Joy, with Florida’s Department of Historical Resources, and his collaborator Morgan Smith, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, had just finished mapping portions of Florida’s Apalachee Bay in the Gulf of Mexico, where they turned up nearly two dozen potential sites from the Late Archaic period (5,000 to 2,500 years ago).
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Mapping Florida’s Apalachee Bay reveals a submerged quarry site where precontact people seem to have worked and lived. Photo by Frank Tozier/Alamy Stock Photo
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Click the link below for the article:
https://hakaimagazine.com
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James' World 2 
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