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Artifacts from a 1969 dig at Stauffer Chemical shed new light on the site's history.
By KATHERINE GAZELLA
© St. Petersburg Times, published May 13, 2001
TARPON SPRINGS -- Firefighters told Judy LeGath that the cluttered old utility room at the city's Cultural Center was a potential fire hazard and had to be cleaned out, so she put the project at the top of her to-do list.
LeGath, the Cultural Center's curator, expected to find nothing more interesting than some old boxes of light bulbs. What she discovered Tuesday morning has local history buffs buzzing.
Amid the cleaning materials, a box of old flying discs and some furnace filters, she found something that had been unearthed one other time, three decades ago. She opened a box containing the results of a long-forgotten archaeological dig at the Stauffer Chemical site. The artifacts were first found in 1969, only to be buried again in a dark corner of the Cultural Center.
"Nobody knew it was there," said Kathy Monahan, the city's cultural affairs director. "When you clean out your closets, you never know what you're going to find."
LeGath also found the original hands to the clock from the building on Pinellas Avenue that now houses the Cultural Center and once was home to City Hall. The old wooden hands have deteriorated with time, and replicas are used on the restored clock. The clock hands may go on display in the Cultural Center, LeGath said.
The Stauffer artifacts could have an important historical impact. Through the years, many people have looked for artifacts that once belonged to American Indians who lived on the property and evidence of an Indian burial mound.
City officials think the artifacts from the recently discovered 1969 survey belonged to Indians who lived there centuries before the Stauffer plant was constructed.
Some portions of the archaeological survey are well-documented, with notes written on the back of election ballots and items preserved in Buttermaid bread bags.
"We're so grateful that whoever did this in 1969 wrote down the month, day and year," LeGath said.
The records reviewed so far have not provided much information about where on the 130-acre Stauffer site the dig took place. One other key piece of information is missing: who performed the dig. An archaeological firm that has worked at the Stauffer site told the city that it may have been a Boy Scout troop.
City officials would like to know, so they can give credit to people who found important pieces of pottery, tools and other objects.
"It would be considered a major dig with all the material," said Phyllis Kolianos, an archaeologist and the manager of the city's Historical Society. "It's just a really neat amount of things."
Kolianos has pieced together three fragments of pottery and has inspected shells and rocks that probably were used as tools. Some of the pottery pieces were identified as Weedon Island shards, which could be from 200 A.D. to 1,000 A.D., Kolianos said.
The artifacts tell a lot about the site and are key to a greater understanding of the early civilizations that lived on the land, she said.
"It was a pretty active site, a very active village," Kolianos said.
She also thinks there is a chance that the village contained a burial mound, which could affect the cleanup of Stauffer, a Superfund site where the soil and water are contaminated from years of phosphorus processing.
State records show two archaeological sites on the Stauffer property. State archaeological surveys performed in 1952 and 1963 describe both sites as prehistoric American Indian sand mounds.
Sand mounds were typically used by Indians for one of three purposes: as bases on which to build their homes to protect them against floods; as temples, which served as the residences for the chiefs; and as burial mounds.
A cleanup plan for the property calls for piling up and capping the 300,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil on the property. Members of the American Indian Movement have said that if a burial mound is discovered, it should not be disturbed.
Depending on what the artifacts indicate, Kolianos said, cleanup of the site could be affected.
"I think this is going to put a little bit of a different slant on their cleanup," she said. "This find is really going to have an impact."
Stauffer recently hired Archaeological Consultants Inc. of Sarasota to conduct a survey to determine the location and significance of the two mounds. In February, two field archaeologists dug hundreds of holes on the Stauffer site to search for artifacts.
Joan Deming of Largo, co-owner of Archaeological Consultants Inc., said the company is writing a report based on what was found in the survey. The report will be presented to Stauffer in several weeks. She declined to discuss what was found or the conclusions of the report until it is finalized.
Deming said she plans to visit Tarpon Springs next week to view the contents of the box found in the utility room at the Cultural Center.
Stauffer site manager Frank McNeice said the consultants' recent survey didn't turn up much: mostly small shards of pottery and flakes trimmed from fossilized limestone used to make stone tools. Most of the artifacts were found on the high ground at the west end of the site, south of Anclote Road, McNeice said.
Nothing found suggests a burial mound on the property, he said.
"I think a lot of that depends on what we find in those boxes," McNeice said, referring to the 1969 dig.
Whether the artifacts lead to a better understanding about a possible burial mound, city officials think the items are important to an appreciation of the city's history. When a new Heritage Museum opens in the old library building in Craig Park, Monahan said, the pottery shards and shells will be on display.
LeGath said the artifacts are a good reminder that "Florida history really goes back a long way," before planned communities and Disney World.
"People have been coming to Florida for a long time to find their own Magic Kingdom," she said.
-- Staff writer Robert Farley contributed to this report. Staff writer Katherine Gazella can be reached at (727) 445-4182.