The Timucuan and Tarpon Springs

When we visited the the Everglades last year, we found a small museum with a fascinating display of Timucuan history and artifacts. The Timucuan were an Amerindian people who lived in Northeast and North Central Florida and southeast Georgia around 1000 - 1500 CE and what amazed me the most was the complexity of their society -- 35 chiefdoms in a rigid feudal system with thousands of people. Even the clothing worn by upper class women was intricate and beautiful.











Shamans performed rituals. As in early Europe and other parts of the Americas, people were buried in large burial and temple mounds for sacrifice to the sun god.









Each Indian was born to become a particular kind of worker in the village -- a little Brave New Worldish. There were warriors and hunters, skilled potters and canoe makers. The old folks, the women, and the children did the planting and food gathering.Unfortunately, Europeans brought diseases with them and by 1700 the people were decimated to 1000.


Yesterday we found another piece of history in Tarpon Springs, an hour to the north of where we are in Indian Shores. There are a number of bayous or bodies of water there that feed into the Gulf of Mexico.




Settlers who built winter homes there in the late 1800s saw Tarpon fish jumping out of the water and named the areas after the fish and water. Then sea sponges were discovered, the best in the world. Greek divers were hired to work in the sponge harvesting industry because they had the skills and diving equipment.


By the 1930s the industry generated millions of dollars. The1953 film Beneath the 12-Mile Reef about sponge diving was filmed in Tarpon Springs.




But just as the Timucuan were wiped out by disease, the sponges -- (Did you know that a sponge is an animal? I didn't.) were wiped out by a red tide algae bloom in 1947 ending the successful sponge harvesting industry.


We're off to see Gravtiy now. Be well.