Collecting the Ichetucknee [Simpson]

Archaeology

Collecting the Ichetucknee

by Jerald T. Milanich and Mrs. H. H. Simpson, Sr.

| AS AN UNDERGRADUATE student assistant in the Florida State Museum, then located in the Seagle Building in downtown Gainesville, one of my duties was to write catalogue numbers on the many objects of the Simpson Collection. It was definitely menial labor, but I became very interested in the collection, assembled by the Simpson family of High Springs, Florida, and later donated to the Museum.

Thirty years have passed and today I am back at the Museum, which has a new name and is in a new building. I often have occasion to refer to artifacts in the Simpson collection, using the very numbers I wrote three decades ago. Of great importance are the many bone tools from the Ichetucknee River.

We returned on a second trip hoping to find some large pieces of what we suspected were bone implements of a vanished race of people.

Collecting the Ichetucknee
from Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida by Jerald T. Milanich, used with permission

Recently, I ran across a charming article written by Mrs. H. H. Simpson, Sr., and published in 1935:

“Until the summer of 1927 our collection consisted of flint and stone implements, shell ornaments and pottery, but in June of that year began the addition of a section that to us is more interesting, if possible, than any of the others. At that time we found, by accident, a clear river [the Ichetucknee] about sixteen miles from our home. I would have to be an artist to describe the beauty of the place. At all times the river is perfectly transparent. In the sandy portions of the bed of the river vari-colored grasses grow, waving back and forth, the different colors blending and forming a beautiful under-water moving picture in the swift current….

The day we found it we waded in the clear water close to the bank, and could see, out in the deeper water, pockets in the rocky bottom which were full of bones of different shapes and sizes. Swimming out and diving Clarence brought up handfuls of the material for examination. Some of the smaller pieces were smooth, and shaped as though made by hand but they were such small fragments that we couldn’t arrive at a definite conclusion. We returned on a second trip hoping to find some large pieces of what we suspected were bone implements of a vanished race of people.

As we stood on the bank and watched him, Clarence dived again and again. In shallow water he picked the bones up with his toes, which have been trained to serve him for various purposes beside the ordinary use of toes. Finally we saw him make a high leap, and run toward shore as fast as he could. Racing to where we stood, and taking a small black object out of his mouth, he exclaimed, excitedly: ‘Now, I know these things are hand-made!’ Upon examining it we found it to be a upper section of a bone artifact, ornamented with lines at the top…. We were overjoyed.”

(Hobbies, 1935, 40[4], pp. 93-94)

Archaeology