Secrets of Miami Circle lie buried

ORLANDO SENTINEL

MIAMI — Nine years ago, an array of American Indians, environmentalists, preservationists, New Age spiritualists, diviners, even Cub Scouts rose up to save the Miami Circle, a 2,000-year-old artifact that many embraced as America’s own Stonehenge.

But today, the Circle — a series of loaf-shaped holes chiseled into the limestone bedrock at the mouth of the Miami River — is interred beneath bags of sand and gravel, laid over the formation in 2003 to protect it from the elements.

And though taxpayers shelled out $27.6 million to buy the 38-foot Circle and its surrounding two acres, visitors to the site’s planned archaeological park likely will never see the actual work of some of Miami’s earliest inhabitants.

“At this point, we don’t know a way,” said Ryan Wheeler, Florida’s state archaeologist. “Maybe in 50 or 100 years archaeologists will have all kinds of technology ... that we can’t imagine today.”

The reburial was supposed to be temporary, while officials settled on a plan to manage and display the Circle, which has inspired as many theories about its origin and function as it has claims about its spiritual energy and mystical powers.

Wheeler and other experts who have studied the Circle think the holes were dug by the Tequesta Indians to support wooden posts for a tribal center or other important structure.

Whatever it was, this much is certain: There’s nothing like it on the continent. Authenticated as prehistoric, it is on the National Register of Historic Places for the clues it could yield about the complex society developed by the Tequestas, a small tribe foraging in the Everglades and Biscayne Bay before the building of the Parthenon in Athens.

Yet visitors to the park, which won’t open for at least a year, will see only an 8-foot replica.

That doesn’t sit well with some of the people who fought to wrest the Circle from the hands of a high-rise developer.

“I’ll be darned,” said Paul George, a Miami historian who will conduct tours of the park for the Historical Museum of Southern Florida. “I thought seeing it was part of the package ... of preserving it.”

Tom Goldstein, the assistant Miami-Dade County attorney who filed the eminent domain suit that derailed plans for two luxury apartment towers on the site, echoed that sentiment.

“I think the whole idea of going to see the Miami Circle is seeing the Miami Circle,” he said.