The Old Vero Site (8IR009)

One Hundred Years Later, The 2014 - 2017 Excavations

By James M. Adovasio, C. Andrew Hemmings, F. J. Vento

A century ago, the Old Vero Site was brought to prominence by Elias Sellards, who claimed that the human remains discovered there were contemporary with Pleistocene fauna. It was the first serious challenge to the belief, widely accepted until the Folsom discoveries in 1926, that humans had not entered Florida before the current Holocene geological epoch. The argument made by Sellards, that early human occupants of North America lived alongside late Ice Age animals, stirred enduring controversy. Recent construction near the site resulted in new archaeological work being completed from 2014 to 2017.
 
The Old Vero Site details the course of the recent re-excavations of the site while also summarizing the original excavations from a century ago. The volume lays out the sequence and results of the recent project, using new data to conclude that Sellards’s claims are not supported by the evidence. Adovasio, Hemmings, and Vento provide the data to settle the matter definitively: human remains at the site were intrusive from a later time horizon, as critics of the original work had vociferously argued.

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J. M. Adovasio is director of archaeology at Senator John Heinz History Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He is also a senior scientist and consulting archaeologist for APTIM. He is author or coauthor of The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory; The First Americans; Basketry Technology; and Strangers in a New Land.

C. Andrew Hemmings is executive director of Paleo to Pioneer and an Associate Scholar with the Aucilla Research Institute.

F. J. Vento is emeritus professor of geosciences at Clarion University of Pennsylvania and president of Quaternary Geological and Environmental Consultants, LLC. His work has appeared in The Transnational Archaic, Geoarchaeology of St. Catherines Island, and The Archaeology of Native Americans in Pennsylvania among others.

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Table of Contents:
List of Figures
List of Tables
Acknowledgments

1. Introduction
2. General Setting
3. History of Research
4. Environmental Setting by A. J. Vega
5. Research Design and Excavation Methodology
6. Field Results
7. Material Culture and Ecological Remains
8. Conclusions
Afterword

Appendix A
Appendix B
Appendix C
Appendix D
Appendix E
Appendix F
Appendix G
Appendix H
References
List of Contributors