Tequesta Indian artifacts unearthed along the banks of Fort Lauderdale's New River
Six decades ago, during an idyllic youth along Fort Lauderdale Is your Fort Lauderdale restaurant clean? - Click Here.'s New River, Bill Caldwell and his pals played cowboys and Indians.
A recent archaeological dig has proved Caldwell's former home — and indeed the entire neighborhood — was the site of a major Tequesta Indian settlement that thrived along the riverbank a thousand years ago.
"This is actually one of the largest prehistoric sites that has survived on the New River," said Bob Carr, an archaeologist who led the excavation. "It was a pretty busy, intensively used village. It could have had 100 people, maybe more."
Using grant money, the county bought 1.25 acres upon which sat the house for $2.8 million last summer from current owner Albert Lidert.
The city will tear down Caldwell's old home and develop and maintain the parcel as a public park on the south bank of the New River within the shadow of downtown high-rises.
But first, as required by the city, the site had to undergo archaeological review.
Crews from Carr's Davie-based nonprofit organization, the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy, began digging last fall. They hit pay dirt. Months of excavating, inch by scratched-out inch, revealed thousands of items that gave witness to almost 500 years of Indian occupation, from roughly 800 to 1200 A.D.
Here lived the Tequesta Indians, Fort Lauderdale's first residents, from the age of Charlemagne to the time of the signing of the Magna Carta.
Deer, fish and shark bones, unearthed where the young Caldwell once romped with playmates, spoke to the Tequestas' diet. Oysters, too, though changes in the river's salinity and shape have made the mollusks extinct.
The diggers also brought up bone pins and clay pottery, some with notched decoration around the rim. (Clay deposits, which provided the material for the Tequestas' pottery, have long ago been bulldozed into oblivion by development.)
Even grizzled archaeologists such as Carr, who has been shoveling up South Florida's past for decades, have been impressed by the discoveries. "We still get excited when we realize we're seeing something hundreds of years old," he said.
Their main find is a cache of a half-dozen ax heads formed from the lips of conch shells, bound in leather and buried. "My suspicion is that they're probably deliberately hidden with the idea of simply coming back on a rainy day and having these tools available," he said. "It's sort of like having your toolbox waiting for you."