This post will be my final post in a series entitled “In search of the Calusa.” Today is number 3. You may have already read 1 & 2.
Pine Island’s Randell Reaserch Center was the perfect place to end Ed and my west coast Calusa journey in May of 2022. It made a huge impression. A big shout out to my Uncle Russell who brought the center to our attention.
The research center and heritage trail is located on the northwest side of Pine Island, an island that is seventeen miles long making it the largest on the Gulf Coast of Florida. Although Ed and I were traveling via our trawler, Adrift, we rented a car and drove about forty-nine miles from Captiva Island to the center.
The Randell Reasearch Center consists of fifty-three acres and is the heart of a huge shell mound of more than a hundred acres. At the center, one can interact with a volunteer expert, walk the Calusa Trail, and then look through artifacts and literature in the museum.
-Adrift docked in Sanibel/Captiva. Its draft precluded a boat outing to Pine Island.
The Calusa were a fascinating and impressive people. Standing tall, long-haired, painted and beautiful, they skillfully constructed towns, built relationships with distant tribes, engineered extensive hand-dug canals, partook in canal-connected “aquaculture” holding-ponds to feed their people, experienced a deep spiritual life, and respectfully buried their dead. This society created complex and self-sufficient living with influence as far away as Cape Canaveral.
It was interesting to me to learn that the Pine Island site was originally named “Tampa.” Apparently, only Big Mound Key near Charlotte Harbor and Mound Key in Estero Bay are comparable in sophistication. All of these communities lived from the overflowing bounty of their estuaries and with shells, fish, and animal bones built what became multi-generational mounds rising from the landscape. These were the great cities of their time and perfectly located for life. The Spanish documented 60 smaller Calusa towns by 1612.
As one walks through the varied landscape, the tallest mound provides an observation platform. These sacred places are where for at least 1500 years these amazing people worshiped, loved, lived and politicized, until unfortunately decimated by European Contact.
Ed and I were so honored to experience their home. Thank you to those who preserved rather than developed these lands. May the spirit of the Calusa Warrior be with us as we fight today to bring our estuaries back to full life.
-The Caloosahatchee River pours out into Pine Island Sound, beyond, and into the Gulf of Mexico.
