Grant funding from National Geographic Society to resume
NORTH PORT -- National Geographic Society funding for dives on the 90-foot ledge at Little Salt Spring will continue this summer.
During a three-week period in July 2008, a $24,000 grant from the National Geographic Society enabled researchers to dive on and excavate portions of the 90-foot ledge of the 250-foot deep sinkhole for the first time since 1975. Ninety-eight percent of the ledge has yet to be excavated.
In January, during a presentation to the Warm Mineral Springs/Little Salt Spring Archeological Society, John Gifford, associate professor at the University of Miami's Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science -- principle investigator for Little Salt Spring -- told the audience about the results of those excavations. Audience member Mary Josher asked him whether the National Geographic funding would continue. He said he hoped so.
Gifford confirmed more research will take place at the site from July 20-30.
"It's a continuation and completion of the work that was begun last year," Gifford said. "We will ... finish the one-by-one meter squares west of the area that we excavated last summer. This is all possible because there were enough funds left in the original budget, and NGS granted us an extension of the project's time limit."
Little Salt Spring, which sits on a 112-acre site just off of Price Boulevard near Glenallen Elementary School, was first recognized as an underwater archaeological site in the late 1950s, making it the first "wet site" discovered in Florida. The University of Miami has owned the site since 1982.
Discoveries at the Springs include a deer antler with 28 parallel notches carved into the wood that could indicate some kind of calendar, wooden stakes driven into the ground that might have served as anchor ports, stone beads for jewelry, and remains of a giant tortoise shell with a sharpened, fire-hardened stake in between the two pieces of carapace.
Artifacts are preserved because the water's chemistry and temperature have created a one-of-a-kind submerged site where microbes and bacteria cannot survive and decomposition is greatly reduced. Paleo-Indian artifacts dating back 12,000 -- or more than 14,000 calendar years -- years have been found, making them among the earliest found anywhere in the U.S. Nothing recovered at Little Salt Spring is younger than 5,500 years old.
During his January lecture, Gifford showed video taken during several of last year's National Geographic-funded dives. He compared excavating underwater to "digging in a very dark closet."
"It's a little stressful to excavate down there, because you're limited to 50 minutes of diving because of the depth," he told the audience. "We haven't found any more artifacts, but we have found fragments of the same tortoise found in 1975. We also excavated a piece of the limestone roof (that fell in when the sinkhole formed)."
The "ultimate hope," Gifford has said, is to find human remains at the Spring.
E-mail: annek@sun-herald.com
By ANNE KLOCKENKEMPER
Staff Writer