Miami’s rampant condo-building is trampling all over history

On Brickell Avenue, near the mouth of the Miami River and a few minutes’ walk from the site of the ancient Miami Circle, sits a parcel of land ready to be developed into a block of luxury high-rise apartments.

It will join the many towering, metal and glass buildings surrounding it in a city that, from first glance, would appear almost entirely a product of the 20th century. But some of these monuments of modernity are markers—gravestones minus the epitaph—to what once lay below.

Experts say 444 Brickell Avenue in Miami is not the first site in which ancient artifacts and human remains dating back millennia have been found, nor will it be the last. However, rather than shining a light on this long and tapestried past, historians and local Native American representatives argue that the city and its property developers are doing their best to hide it.

“When it comes to Indigenous people and Indigenous sites, there’s a real blindness to the fact that they exist, where we routinely refer to [Henry] Flagler as the founder of Miami or Julia Tuttle as the mother of Miami; we ignore the thousands of years of history that precede that,” Andrew Frank, an ethnohistorian at Florida State University, who has written about the region’s Native American past, told Newsweek. “That includes Indigenous history, [but] it also includes African American history, or English history, or Spanish history.”

Early in April, the City of Miami opted to move forward with the construction on Brickell Avenue, despite opposition from local Native American groups.

Betty Osceola, an activist and member of the Miccosukee Tribe, previously said she thought the area should be preserved in the same way as the Miami Circle—a prehistoric Tequesta circle cut into the limestone bedrock—telling local news channel WPLG in Miami that it “felt like our ancestors were being disrespected.”

Robert Rosa, of the American Indian Movement of Florida, railed against the archaeological dig itself, calling it a “big desecration,” suggesting the site should be left untouched.

The site’s developer has stressed that the development would provide jobs and stimulate the local economy, as well as providing a larger tax base for Miami. It has also noted that it owns the parcel of land, which already had commercial structures on it when it was purchased nearly a decade ago.

According to WTVJ, the development was planned to comprise three towers, including 1,400 residential units, as well as offices, hotel and retail space. Two of the towers will be built, with part of the land designated as historic and objects found on the site preserved, though exactly in what way is unclear.

The developers, the Related Group, have said they want to delay historical designation until after the two-year archaeological dig, which it is funding, has been completed. A number of artifacts dating as far back as 7,000 years have been uncovered, as have human remains.

Archaeologists have been aware of historically significant artifacts on the site for several years. A 2021 report by the Archaeological and Historical Conservancy Inc. listed tools and ornaments made from shells, bone and stone, animal bones and teeth, as well as a human tooth, fragments of a pelvis and part of a long bone.

It found that among the parts of the patch surveyed, there were artifacts that were suggestive of contact being made between the Indigenous occupants with Europeans in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The occupants were Tequesta, a now-defunct tribe whose territory covered a swath of South Florida until the middle of the 18th century. The frequency in which such sites cropped up along the Miami River suggests that the area might have been the focal point of the civilization.

“We think they’re the center of this larger civilization,” Frank said. “We think this is their ceremonial grounds, we think this is the heart.”

Jackie Gomez, an artist and history student who has been photographing Tequesta sites since 2018, told Newsweek: “This is a very important site, not just to the Seminole of Florida but to a very large trading route that went from Argentina all the way to Canada. For 10,000 years, people were moving through there.”

Newsweek reached out to the City of Miami and the Related Group via email on Thursday for comment.

Given the rich history of the area, academics view the Brickell Avenue site as potentially significant, but the developer argues that though the finds are important and worth preserving, the site itself is not notable enough to warrant being left untouched. Moreover, various issues surround the conservation of such sites.

A Genealogical Problem

Particularly when Native American human remains are found, there are laws regarding repatriation of the remains and artifacts of an extant tribe. But the Tequesta pose a genealogical problem in that there is not a consensus on whose ancestors they are.

“There’s a debate, if you will, as to whether the Tequesta and the ancient people of Florida are ancestors of the Seminole. The Seminole certainly think so,” Frank said.

The Seminole, a federally recognized tribe that occupies parts of Florida and Oklahoma, are believed to have been one of several tribes to migrate into the region to escape encroachment by European settlers. But it is unclear whether the Seminole arose out of the Tequesta.

Frank said historical and anthropological evidence suggest that the Seminole have Tequesta ancestors, as well as ancestors who migrated to Florida, but added “that doesn’t mean these folks aren’t family.”

He said the academic consensus a century ago was that the Seminole were entirely newcomers, and argued: “What developers often do is they lean on this older scholarship to say that the Seminoles and the Miccosukees don’t have any legitimate say because these aren’t their people.”

A spokesperson for the Seminole told Newsweek: “In keeping with the sanctity of all burial sites and the cultural sensitivity of all Seminoles, the Seminole Tribe of Florida prefers to not publicly discuss the burial places of its ancestors.”

In terms of repatriation, there is added complexity in that the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), a federal law that governs what institutions must do with discovered Indigenous human remains, does not apply for private or local government land.

Annie Riegert, head of human osteology and NAGPRA coordinator at the Texas Archaeological Research Laboratory who wished not to be quoted directly, told Newsweek there were not enough protections for human remains but that even if there was ambiguity over the law, local tribes should be consulted. It is understood that the Seminole and Miccosukee were contacted by state officials, as per the requirements that are set in motion upon discoveries such as this one.

In a column for the Miami Herald on March 16, Jorge Perez, CEO of the Related Group, said that he recognized there were “genuine concerns, including those of the descendants of Indigenous people who once lived along the Miami River”—a tacit acceptance of Seminole and Miccosukee ancestry—but stressed that the developer had done everything it could to fulfil its legal responsibilities.

“The main controversy seems to involve how the archaeological finds will be handled in the future,” he wrote. “While we are still awaiting final archaeological reports, the early consensus among city and state officials and advisors is that the findings, to date, do not merit preservation on the site. This means the artifacts that are found are not required to stay in the ground.”

Questions of Significance

While some prefer that the site to be left alone entirely or preserved as an area of historical significance, the compromise reached by the City of Miami’s Historic and Environmental Preservation Board will see at least part of the site preserved.

The Related Group has said that artifacts found on the site will head to a museum for preservation. Riegert noted that it is common for museums to consult with Native American tribes on how such items should be handled and negotiate conditions for their display. She added that given the federal funding many museums receive, it would be surprising if the artifacts accepted into a collection avoided coming under NAGPRA.

Perez wrote that while the items discovered were “interesting and important,” the site “is not another Miami Circle.” But Frank suggested the process was moving too fast for academics to know the true significance of the site.

“We’re making decisions [as to] what to do before we know what the site actually is, and that makes it very hard,” he said. “Once the buildings are built, it’s too late. They’re not going to knock the buildings down to preserve something—that ship has sailed.”

Referencing the discovery of a 7,000-year-old artifact on the Brickell Avenue site, Frank noted that it “changes my understanding of the site” if it could be determined whether that item was created at the site, indicating a human presence as far back as the Neolithic period, or if the site was more recent and it found its way there after being “traded over many, many generations.”

Robert Carr, the site’s lead archaeologist, told Miami Today in May 2022 that he was bound by an agreement with the developer not to discuss the findings publicly until the excavation work is done.

Paving Over History

The Related Group is doing everything it is required to do by law to conserve what is found on its development site. But, Frank said, “the City of Miami has a tradition, and Miami Dade County has a tradition, of going by the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.”

“As a historian, my biggest frustration, candidly, is we keep having all these sites get discovered, and we publicly pretend time and time again that we’re surprised to find them,” he added. “And then we hide their presence so when we find another one of the sites, we’re surprised again. It seems like every two years we’re having the same conversation.”

“The City of Miami has this kind of amnesia about its own history,” Gomez said.

A site such as the Miami Circle is often held up as a shining example of conservation efforts in the city. But even though construction on the site was prevented so the circle could be preserved, Frank said that it had become “a de facto dog park,” offering little in the way of educating visitors about the historical significance of the site.

“The Miami Circle isn’t even presented in the way that it should be,” Gomez said. “You should be able to go to the Miami Circle and get a sense of what that site looked like in the past, but you get absolutely no sense of that whatsoever.”

“The historian in me wishes that if we’re going to do all these horrible things, at least they should not continue erasing the Indigenous past—and that’s this recurring thing, for me,” Frank said. “It’s so clear that the story is being paved over.”