Is Miami really going to keep letting developers pave over our most ancient sites? | Opinion

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-year-old Tequesta Indian site that generated great local excitement and international fanfare. We spent $27 million in public money to save it from destruction as yet another condo was built. It’s now a National Historic Landmark — safe, but largely hidden and unappreciated.

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.

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.”

No one’s talking

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. Eventually, 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 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 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.

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 such rare discoveries 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.