I love digging underwater, but loathe of the endless mechanical circus. Don’t get me wrong – being able to vacuum up sediment with a giant hose is far better than having to lug bucket  after bucket of backdirt up and out of your unit. And as far as archaeology is concerned, nothing can beat floating […]

Depending on technology to breathe is sketchy, particularly when that technology is not all that dependable. While diving in the Aucilla River, our crew relied on surface supplied air, run off a Brownie Third Lung hookah. We dug it out of the dive locker at the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research where it had been […]

Stained black by the surrounding swamps, the Aucilla River is an obsidian mirror; it reflects the overhanging forest while hiding a labyrinth of rocks, snags. In places it disappears, running underground – in others, it conceals deep sinkholes formed by collapsed limestone caverns. For decades, river divers have descended into these dark pits in search […]

I took this picture in the early morning as Eddie and I drifted down the gentle Aucilla River. It was cool and the sun had just cleared the trees. Fog clung to the calm water as it slid along the banks and beneath the overhanging branches. Jessi and Ann came behind us on the small […]

God knows how many holes the serene Aucilla punched into Eddie’s pontoon boat. It was a miracle we did not sink; I think we remained afloat only because of Eddie’s hard headed insistence on doing so. The pontoons of the aforementioned pontoon boat were steel veterans of the Second World War, though, if Eddie had […]

Sinkholes are unreasonably complex phenomena – those in rivers doubly so. If you can figure out their geological history, you have a better chance of figuring out how artifacts got there. As far as I can tell, this is not a straight forward task. As time goes by, sinks are subject to slumping, flood deposits, […]

Digging square holes underwater (in low visibility) can get a little ridiculous – it is, however, achievable. To simplify the process, we used an excavation frame built by Jim Dunbar. The design is ingeniously simple. The frame is a two meter by three meter metal grid that can be raised or lowered on poles. Divers […]

We did not expect to be able to see anything in the river. Typically, the Aucilla is blackwater, stained by tannins leeching in from the swamp. In previous years, divers needed powerful lights to work even just 15 to 20 feet from the surface. This was not a typical year. The climate worked in our […]

The beautiful old building is made entirely from local tounge and groove magnolia boards. The deck looks right out over the river where the Aucilla comes rushing up from an underground stretch. Right off the back deck there is a convenient dock where we could load and unload the small boat. The cabin was made […]