Florida is the boating capital of the United States: In 2016, the state had more registered recreational boats than any other. But to Julie Duggins, an archaeologist for the state’s Division of Historical Resources, that nautical achievement is only the modern iteration of a history that goes back more than 6,000 years.
“Florida has always been a capital for watercraft and boating,” she says. More impressive than the state’s current boating record is its archaeological one. Florida has the highest concentration of archaeological dugout canoes of anywhere in the world—more than 400 wooden boats that show, as Duggins says, “how early Floridians navigated our rivers like highways.”
The most recent addition to that collection is a battered canoe spotted by a photographer out for a bike ride following Hurricane Irma in September. It has not yet been officially dated, but this newly discovered dugout—a canoe made from a single, hollowed-out log—has metal nails and other features that indicate it’s anywhere from a few decades to centuries old
For a Florida dugout, though, that’s not a particularly impressive age. Of the canoes in the state’s database, almost three-quarters are considered prehistoric, meaning that they were made before 1513, when Juan Ponce de Léon first documented his experiences on the peninsula. The earliest canoe ever found in the state is close to 7,000 years old.
Archaeologists there first started collecting information about these discoveries in the late 1970s, after a drought revealed a lot of long-preserved wooden artifacts.
Barbara Purdy, who was an archaeologist at the University of Florida for many years, started surveying these ancient canoes and publishing ads that asked anyone who had found an ancient boat to call and report it.There were heartbreaking moments in her quest. In 1985, a large company told Purdy its earthmovers had uncovered a trove of canoes and other artifacts. She and her colleagues took a sample of one boat and promised to return when the water table was lower, so they could excavate. That small sample indicated the canoe was 3,300 years old—the oldest they had discovered at the time. But when they came back the next year, the entire find had been destroyed.
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