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Our images of ancient people paint them less intelligent and more sav-
age than we are. Evidence from the Windover Site offers a very different view. The boy being carried in the illustration above, was born with spina bifida, a condition which leaves the nerves along the spine without the bony protection of the backbone. He may never have been able to walk. And yet, he lived until he was 14 years old.
REEVALUATING OUR ANCIENT PAST
by Hermann Trappman
The story of the Windover Archaeological Site came into my awareness like a clap of thunder. Three things riveted my attention and changed my perspective. The first was fabric, second is an older woman with healed multiple fractures, and third, the story of a fourteen year old boy with spina bifida. This evidence opens up worlds of possibility. He is an eight thousand year old message of love, sent directly to you. Imagine a small tribe of people living in a stingy landscape, dusty and unrelenting. It was a changing world. Glaciations were in major retreat. Oceans were surging back. Everyday patterns of life were menacing. Palmetto scrubb, extending to the horizon, was broken by islands of trees. Fresh drinking water was a premium. The people probably migrated seasonally through a circuit of distant camps to procure game. As the plants and animals they relied upon at one place became scarce, the people moved on. The health problems and the weaving seem to suggest that they weren’t constantly on the move, but stayed at a site for extended periods. I imagine her struggling in a small domed hut. Darkness. The night grudgingly retreating around the dim glow of a small burning pine taper. Like trembling sparks of fire, the perspiration on her face and chest scattered tiny reflections. The people waited in inky shadows. Loving hands stroked her forehead. “Push.” a woman whispered behind the faint golden halo. “Push.” In a while there was a shaky cry. “It’s a boy.” The people smiled from the darkness. He could become a new hunter, a new protector. He looked so normal, but the bones of his lower back lay open, exposing his spine. That wonderful neural network that could send him running along game trails was exposed. He may never have walked. From the evidence, it seems that his legs withered with time. Diminished circulation may have led to infection in his feet. In the end, he had lost one foot and part of a leg. Someone had to bathe the infection away. Someone had to treat the infection with local herbs. The boy with spina bifida had to be carried from camp to camp. Love shouts from his remains. Love shouts across all those thousands of years to shock our sensibilities and our image of ancient people. He should chase away our modern notions of “survival of the fittest.” He died when he was around 14 years old. The woman with the multiple fractures
leaves us wondering. Was she caught by a raiding party? Call it just a hunch or a feeling, but I don’t think that it’s the evidance of an absuve husband. I keep coming back to her healing, to a family which cared, to the medicines which cleaned her wounds and reduced the pain. Our European culture was given the secret of asprin from the Native Americans. Asprin comes from the bark and roots of the black willow. Our local coastal willow contains some of the same pain relieving medicine. Did they know how to use it back then? The Windover people laid a mat beneath the body of their dead. The body was clothed in beautifully woven fabric. The burial was below the water level of a peat bog. Stakes, driven into the fabric, held the body down. It was an environment which carefully preserved these messages from the past. The weaving should make us reevaluate many of the artifacts left in sites all over the state. The fabric strongly indicates the use of a loom. We may wish to reconsider our interpretation of many artifacts and their importance.
Interconnected like a web, an artifact is supported by available resources and their harvest, a plan of use, the correct tools to turn raw materials into a usable stage, and the technique to manufacture the product. Thread for weaving may have come from a number of local plants. Bear grass, a member of the yucca family, has strong, fine, pliable fiber. We do have a long fiber native cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.). Although a bit brittle, I find palmetto and cabbage palm can offer rough pliable thread, especially if it’s been treated. The fiber has to be spun into thread. Spinning requires tools to make it easy. Some native people spin by catching the fiber between the palm of their hand and their thigh. Or, we might be overlooking the tool which the ancestors used to spin. If palm is being used, then a sharp pinlike tool makes separating palm fiber less demanding. A loom of the simplist design requires wooden heddle sticks to seperate the elements of the weave. A stick to wrap the fiber for the weft needs to be carved as well as a broad, flat, smooth stick used for beating the weave together. If the sticks are the slightest bit rough they will catch the threads and pull out the fibers. There is a variety of sticks and slats in the Key Marco collection which look a lot like tools Native American women still use to weave. Used by Mayan women to push the thread down against the rest of the fabric, there is a bone tool we usually identify as a hair pin.
With passing time and new needs, surely the tools would have become more sophisticated. Later looms may have used weights to hold the warp taunt. Those puzzling shell plummets, or columella pendants could easily be used as warp weights. An archaeologist with the Florida Museum of Natural History, William Marquardt re-evaluated shell scrapers and came up with the net gauge. Although it may seem of small consequence, standardized net gauges were the first real indicator of an industry which might go beyond purely local need. His research demonstrated that the same standards seem to have been used from the Keys to the Panhandle. Our ancestral people were a circumCaribbean people. To the west lay the Mayan and Aztec. To the north were the Mississippi mound building cultures. To the south was Cuba and a string of stepping stone islands which led to South America. All the evidence points to our people as being a mound building sophisticated culture with much more to offer than arrow points and the tools of war. Our people were a story as rich as Homers Iliad and Odyssey. Trade invested their own local ideas with new concepts from afar. We can re-evaluate the evidence from ancient Florida and bring these wonderful people back to life, or we can leave them as an indistinct shadow, a people without form and substance. Their story reaches out to us. Do we reach back to them to give them a future they deserve—a part of our heritage?
A few of the tools used by Navaho weavers. These photographs, taken by anthropologists, were supplied by Phylis Morrison from her book SPIDERS GAMES. Copyright © 1979 by the University of Washington Press. Reprinted by permission of the University of Washington Press.
Wolf’s Heart Lodge Loom weights or Warp-weights Heddle Sticks This ancient style of loom is called a warp-weighted loom and would have been familiar to Penelope, the wife of Odysseus in Homer’s epicThe Odyssey. Because the Eurpoean conquerors didn’t write about woven fabric in their descriptions of Florida, it has been assumed that our native people didn’t weave. Recent evidance suggests we need to rethink this notion.
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