Is Miami really going to keep letting developers pave over our most ancient sites?
It’s not surprising anymore. Another chunk of land being redeveloped along the Miami River has yielded a trove of ancient artifacts of serious historical and scientific significance, a finding that could offer valuable information about how the earliest Miamians lived.
Also not surprising: Developers seem intent on building there anyway.
Miami, we have been here before. In 1998, we uncovered the Miami Circle, a 2,000-yearold Tequesta Indian site that generated great local excitement and international fanfare. We spent $27 million in public money to save it from development into yet another condo. It’s now a National Historic Landmark.
A second set of sites found along the river a few years later was handled far differently. In 2014, the developer, MDM, struck a deal to preserve a fraction of what was excavated, allowing the company to build on the vast majority of the property in downtown Miami. Even that measly deal — hailed as “history-making” cooperation — hasn’t been fully honored, some nine years later. The foot-dragging has gone on so long that the city and the developer headed back into mediation in December over requirements for displaying the small bits of the site that were preserved for the residents of this city.
And now we have this latest find, which may be the oldest and most significant of all. On property owned by the Related Group, on the Miami River’s south bank just west of the Brickell Avenue bridge, archaeologists have uncovered fragmentary prehistoric tools and artifacts, animal and plant remnants, clues to ancient structures, human remains — even 7,000-year-old spearheads. The Related Group developers plan a residential tower complex for the site.
‘LEGITIMATELY OLD’
The importance of this site isn’t just the artifacts, but also the record they provide, going back thousands of years, long before the Roman Empire, all the way back to the emergence of cities in Mesopotamia. It’s evidence of continuous indigenous settlement along the river for much longer than had previously been believed.
“By any measure, this is an early manifestation of human activity,” William Pestle, an archaeologist and chairman of the anthropology department at the University of Miami, told the Herald. “This is legitimately old.”
Yet there’s been no fanfare this time. The opposite, actually. As the Miami Herald reported, no one has seemed to want to talk about the newest evidence of prehistoric life in Miami. A Herald reporter asked for information for weeks from both city officials overseeing the dig and the developer, too. Eventusurate with other careers, our children will continue to fall behind other nations.
– Art Young, West Kendall
UNEASY FEELING?
Few topics arouse the indignation of certain politicians and certain men of the cloth than the public discussion of sex; and it’s even worse when the sex is interracial. This explains the proposals in Florida to ban discussions that make people uncomfortable.
Celebrated Black author Richard Wright, in his iconic 1940 novel, “Native Son,” describes how the protagonist fantasized of sleeping with the white daughter of his boss.
When that book was written, that salacious part omitted and would not be restored until 1953 by literary critic Arnold Rampersad, in the Library of America edition.
We can derive two morals from Wright’s experience. First, we can describe lynchings, rapes and generalized mayhem against Blacks, but we cannot describe interracial sexual feelings. Second, the great saving grace of America is that we will always have brave figures like Rampersad.
– Anthony P. Maingot, professor emeritus
of sociology, FIU, Plantation
TO THE POINT
The Feb. 10 op-ed by Robert F. Sanchez, “When will ‘allies’ work to end war in Ukraine instead of prolonging it?” misses the point that wars should
BOB MCFARLIN
ally, the city released a statement that was little more than a recitation of the required procedures being followed and how the excavation was being monitored. A city spokeswoman told the Editorial Board Friday that there was nothing new to add.
The developer, meanwhile, told the Herald it had “performed the meticulous excavation, analysis, organization, regular reporting to applicable regulatory authorities and careful preservation of all relevant findings.”
On Friday, after the Editorial Board asked, a spokesman for Related went further, saying, in part, that, “To date, the findings do not require preservation on the site. They will be preserved offsite. While many artifacts have been found, they have been carefully retrieved and will be preserved and properly documented and ultimately donated to a museum or university for further research and study.”
That remains to be seen. It’s the city, not the developer, that regulates archaeological digs in designated zones and could require full or partial preservation of the site.
Have the findings been kept “under wraps,” as one neighbor told the Herald, to avoid the kind of publicity that would make preservation an obvious conclusion? It’s hard not to think so.
The Related Group spent a lot of money for the land — $104 million in 2013, property records indicate — and then took out a $164 million construction loan in January for the first tower, the Herald reported. We understand no developer invests that kind of money without expecting a substantial return.
Also, the company is following legal requirements for excavation and documentation of the site, which costs more money. It would no doubt be expensive to repeat what we did for the Miami Circle, and buy only end like World War
II, with totalitarians defeated, be they Russian imperialists in Ukraine or Zionist colonialists seeking to rule all Palestine.
Just so, our white hetero-totalitarians’ efforts at oppression and dictatorship by deceit, gerrymandering and armed insurrection will likely need to be eliminated by the continuation of politics by other means.
– Johann Moore-Goldring,
Miami Beach
MESSAGE LACKING
The Republican Party has no philosophical content. Every one of its talking points is just a negative reaction to some perceived wrong — antimasking, anti-gay, antiimmigration, anti-Black empowerment — all
ALEX MENA
out the developer to save the site.
But this is about more than one developer. It’s about our responsibility to future generations to save pieces of our past. The city’s first responsibility is to its residents, not to developers. We need to preserve important findings like these in ways that are truly accessible to researchers, residents and visitors, as the Miami Herald Editorial Board has said before. We already have a lot of condos in this town; we have found only three of these critically important ancient sites — and one is mostly paved over already.
LATE TO THE GAME
With this new discovery, we think a full-fledged conversation on the issue is required. It may happen. The city’s historic preservation board on Tuesday, in an unexpected move, told historic preservation director Anna Pernas to study whether the new site should be a protected archaeological landmark. The site has been quietly under excavation for 16 months; but even the board didn’t take the action until experts and residents who’d heard about the findings came to the meeting at Miami City Hall. fueled by anger and paranoia broadcast from suspect news outlets. Therefore, welcoming poor immigrants becomes “pandering to the radical left Socialist Agenda,” and protests about police brutality on minorities become an “Antifa invasion.”
Gov. DeSantis, seizing on this attitude, has turned the somewhat annoying but harmless “woke” attitude into an existential threat and is changing laws to legalize persecuting those who don’t agree with him, including The Walt Disney Company.
Some positive vibes coming from the GOP would be nice, but I guess that’s too “woke.”
– Robert McIntire,
Plantation
DANA BANKER
The designation would mean the city could require the developer to preserve some or all of the site or, more likely, make accommodations in its project for public exhibition. It’s the least that should happen in this case, but citizens should be wary. That kind of agreement didn’t work so well at the MDM site, that’s for sure.
A study is a start. But we need to talk about this discovery in a larger context as well, including acknowledging that what we’ve been doing so far to preserve what’s found really isn’t working. Previous efforts to preserve artifacts from the other sites have resulted in hundreds of boxes being stored in a Broward County warehouse, with no plans to display them. Even the Miami Circle, wrested from the hands of developers, is little more than a dog park these days, covered over to preserve it from the elements but without any real effort to develop an exhibit that would showcase and explain the findings.
Miami’s residents deserve better. How many more ancient sites are we going to pave over, losing them forever? Miami wants to be the city of the future. But first it needs to learn how to preserve its past.
WOMEN’S HEALTH
Anabely Lopes’ devastating story in the Feb. 7 Miami Herald, “Her fetus had a fatal birth defect. She had to fly out of Florida for an abortion,” should make clear the impact the 15-week abortion ban has had on pregnant women in the state. Maternal health statewide, especially for Black and Latino Floridians, has been devastating.
While Lopes was able to travel out of state to get an abortion, not everyone can do so.
Latinas are the largest group affected by abortion ban restrictions, with nearly 6.5 million living in the 26 states that have banned or are likely to ban abortions.
As activists with the Florida Access Network (FAN), we see the extreme impact of this ban hurting people of color in our community every day. People seeking abortion access resources are typically parents already struggling to make ends meet amid inflation and an economic crisis.
With legislators continuing to push for laws to strip our most vulnerable communities of their bodily autonomy, FAN stands ready to fight. We will continue advocating for people like Lopes and demand lawmakers stop trying to further limit access to full reproductive care in Florida.
– Ysabella Osses, director of advocacy
and organizing, Florida Access Network,
Orlando
GOOD ADVICE
Tom Brady shows he desperately needs Gisele to tell him it’s important to put his big boy pants on. His sons are watching. – Renee Gildman,
Boca Raton