by Bill Moody, West Tisbury, Massachusetts
Volume 64, Number 2, April 2017 Central States Archaeological Journal
Each summer when I was a young boy, my parents would take me and my brother to visit our grandparents on the west coast of Florida. They lived in the small town of Riverview, along the Alafia River, in what today would be known as “old Florida.” Over 50 years ago, much of Florida looked very different than it does today. Riverview was situated some 25 miles south of Tampa out in the countryside and, as it seemed to a young boy, offered a remote and exciting rural paradise.
We had the river to fish in, the woods to explore and new adventures every summer. One day as my brother and I headed out with our cane poles for an early morning of fishing, I was watching my steps carefully, looking between the plank boards that made up the stairs leading down to my grandfather’s handmade cypress dock. I suddenly spotted something that appeared quite out of the ordinary.
As readers of this journal may have guessed, it was my first artifact! I yelled to my brother that I could see an “arrowhead” under the steps right there in view on the side of the riverbank. He said, “No, you don’t!” But I was undeterred. I was absolutely sure of what I was looking at.
The river, at this point in its winding course towards Tampa Bay, is a tidal river. On that particular morning, it was a low tide. So I quickly hoisted myself over the railing and climbed down onto the exposed river bed. I carefully retrieved the ancient treasure and tightly closed my hand around its Christmas-tree shape. I had never actually seen a real arrowhead before, but I knew without question what this shiny piece of tan flint must be.
After that momentous event for a 12-year-old boy, I would divide my all-too-short time equally each summer while visiting my grandparents. There would be fishing at high tide and then the searching for arrowheads and fossils along the riverbank as the tide receded.
Once my grandfather realized how much joy I took in finding these traces of the early people who had lived out their lives in this beautiful part of North America, he thought of numerous ways over the next few summers to surprise and encourage me. He would take my brother and me to explore a prehistoric shell mound farther down the river. He would also present me with gifts of the few arrowheads he and my dad had found in much earlier years. And one summer before we arrived, he stood patiently in the 90° heat to watch a highway crew clean out the drainage ditch that bordered his property. As they shoveled the dirt onto his side of the ditch, he was able to retrieve two very fine artifacts. One was a flaked flint axe head, and the other was an exceptional and very thin paleo Simpson blade.
When we arrived later that same summer, my grandfather stood outside to greet us as my mother drove up the dirt road to his house. When we got out of old Buck, he asked me to close my eyes and hold out my hands. He carefully placed the large Simpson blade (Fig. 1) across the palms of my two small hands, and then told me to open my eyes. You can imagine what a thrill that was!
Today in my “family tree” collection, I have artifacts originally found by my grandfather, my dad, my mother, my first cousin, and my wife. And one of these “winged thoughts” from the past, as Henry David Thoreau called them, is a very fine dart point that was presented to me by my great Aunt Mary. She was approaching her 90th birthday and quietly said that she had been saving it for me.
When my Aunt Mary was a schoolteacher in Riverview in her early twenties, one of her young students came to her desk one morning and said he had a gift for her. Instead of the proverbial apple, he offered her the arrowhead that he had just found. She kept it safe in her old oak curio cabinet for nearly 70 years, and then finally felt it was time to offer it to me for the family collection. Once again, I was overjoyed!
In the accompanying photographs with this article (Figs. 1, 2), in addition to the large Simpson blade, which measures just over 5½ inches in length, you will see projectile point types such as Bolen Plain, Sumter, Marion, Newnan, Culbreath, Putnam, Thonotosassa, Ocala, Hillsborough, and a restored fluted point (Figure 2). It is clear that the site was inhabited intermittently over a very long period, from Paleo times through the Early and Late Archaic eras and up to at least the Early Woodland phase.
Somehow, as a boy, I managed to keep every flint flake I found, and later realized that many of these were also ancient stone tools, exhibiting careful edge work or clear evidence of utilization. I also discovered several pebble beads and a couple of pottery sherds, as well as numerous fossil sharks’ teeth along with many invertebrate and vertebrate fossils that had eroded out of the lower levels of the limestone riverbank.
Anyone who has collected artifacts will readily understand how much this small part of my entire collection means to me. My grandparents’ home no longer stands on the property, and the small parcel of land itself was later taken over by the state of Florida to make room for the expansion of the adjacent highway.
Today, more than five decades later, whenever I sit and hold these wonderful artifacts, I reflect on all the happy times my brother and I shared with my grandparents as a boy. I still have vivid dreams from time to time of those long summer days searching along the banks of the Alafia River. These bits of worked flint are truly rare “winged thoughts” as well as special treasures from the past.
References
Bullen, Ripley P.
1975 A Guide to the Identification of Florida Projectile Points. Kendall Books.
Goodyear, Albert C., Sam B. Upchurch, Mark J. Brooks, and Nancy M. Goodyear.
1983 “Paleo-Indian Manifestations in the Tampa Bay Region, Florida.” The Florida Anthropologist 36 (1–2): 40–66. Florida Anthropological Society. Coral Gables, Florida.
Moody, B.
2004 “The O.W. Moody Alafia River Site—A Young Boy’s Introduction to Florida Prehistory.” The Amateur Archaeologist: Special Issue Devoted to Amateur Contributions to Florida Archaeology 10 (2): 27–34. Robert L. Knight, ed. American Society for Amateur Archaeology (Dr. R. M. Gramly, organizer). Partners’ Press, Kenmore, New York.
Purdy, Barbara A.
1986 Florida’s Prehistoric Stone Technology. University Presses of Florida. Gainesville, Florida.
Figure 1 caption:
At top: Figure 1. Simpson blade, found by author’s grandfather, measuring just over 5½ inches.
Figure 2 caption:
Figure 2. The “family tree” collection. Top row, fourth projectile point to the right of the pottery sherd was the author’s first find as a boy.
