Remembering Tocobaga: Recent Archaeology at the Safety Harbor Site in Tampa Bay

February 19 - at 6:00 PM - Selby Library, downtown Sarasota, 1331 First St., Sarasota Admission is Free. The Safety Harbor site (8PI2) is widely recognized as the probable location of the native town of Tocobaga, where Spanish Governor Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established a short-lived mission-fort in the 1560s. It later became the location for the planation owned by one of the area’s most legendary settlers, “Count” Odet Philippe. Philippe is said to have been a childhood friend of Napoleon, the first European settler of Pinellas County, the first to cultivate citrus in Florida, and the first to introduce cigar rolling to Tampa Bay; generally omitted from such tall tales is the fact that he was slave owner of likely Afro-Caribbean heritage. Despite the historical importance of Native town of Tocobaga and the later Philippe plantation, however, the Safety Harbor site has been only minimally investigated, and rarely using modern archaeological methods. Matthew Stirling of the Smithsonian Institution excavated the burial mound in the 1930s, resulting in the recovery of hundreds of human burials. However, the methods were coarse and the results were minimally reported. Modern-era professional investigation of the Safety Harbor site is limited mainly to the limited work by John Griffin and Ripley Bullen in 1948, who excavated a test trench in the platform mound and several additional trenches in the village. In 2019, the Department of Anthropology at USF began the first more intensive and professional archaeological investigations of the Safety Harbor site in more than 70 years. Geophysical survey (including ground-penetrating radar, gradiometer, and electrical resistivity) provide a glimpse of what is buried beneath the surface, including everything from buried shell middens associated with the village of Tocobaga to utility lines associated with the development of the park. Systematic sampling (50-cmsquare shovel tests and 1-x-1-m test units) provided samples of artifacts, including: copious quantities of shell, pottery, and stone tools associated with Tocobaga; pipe fragments, pottery, nails, and bricks associated with the later settlement by Philippe, his family, and the enslaved people that worked the plantation; and coins and other modern artifacts associated with modern-era park goers.