Cayo Pelau Archaeological Site facts for kids

Cayo Pelau Archaeological Site is a special place in Charlotte Harbor, Florida. It's an ancient site where people lived long ago. This area is on the west coast of Florida, right on the Gulf of Mexico.

What makes Cayo Pelau unique is that it sits across two different counties: Lee County to the south and Charlotte County, Florida to the north. This site holds many clues about the lives of early people in Florida.

What is Cayo Pelau?

Cayo Pelau is known as an "archaeological site." This means it's a place where scientists called archaeologists dig to find old things. These old things, like tools, pottery, and bones, help us learn about people who lived there thousands of years ago.

The site has two main parts:

• A large burial mound: This is a hill made by people to bury their dead.
• A midden: This is like an ancient trash pile, mostly made of shells, where people threw away their food scraps and broken tools.

A Look Back in Time

Scientists have studied the pottery found at Cayo Pelau. Based on these pottery pieces, the burial mound and midden date back a very long time, from about 800 BC to 500 BC. This period is known as the Glades I Period. The types of pottery found, like Orange ceramics and early Glades and St. Johns ceramics, help archaeologists figure out these dates.

People continued to use the site even into the early 1800s. For example, Cuban fishermen used it as a fishing camp.

Important Discoveries

Some interesting items found at the site include metal tablets from the Calusa people. The Calusa were a powerful Native American group in Southwest Florida. One tablet was made of silver, and another was made of copper. These tablets are from the 1500s, after Europeans first arrived in the area.

Who Explored Cayo Pelau?

Many people have explored Cayo Pelau over the years.

Early Digs

One of the first people to dig at the site was Montague Tallant. He collected many items and later gave some of them to the Florida Museum of Natural History.

Smithsonian Research

Later, a famous archaeologist named Gordon R. Willey wrote about Cayo Pelau in his book for the Smithsonian Institution. He described the burial mound as being about 27 meters (90 feet) long and 1.8 to 2.5 meters (6 to 8 feet) high. He noted that it contained pottery from both the Glades Plain and Weeden Island cultures.

In the 1950s, two other archaeologists, John Goggin and William Plowden, also dug into the shell midden. They found that the midden was used much later than the burial mound, from about 800 AD to 1000 AD.