I HAVE JUST COMPLETED a detailed plaster-of-paris “geological block diagram” type model of 8/DA/12 – the so-called “Great Miami Stone Circle” at Brickell Point, Miami. (I was a member of the original excavating team during the field season 1998-99). The model is at the scale of 1:30 and depicts the site as it appeared in the closing phase when the entire basin ring had been exposed to view.

Models of “digs” – with or without hypothetical reconstructions of dwellings and other structures – are very useful ways to convey a lot of information about sites – quickly and accurately. The obvious advantages include a realistic 3-D view rather than the conventional 2-D view in print media or slides, and the further advantage that a model lets the viewer “see” site relations instantly instead of having to mentally “synthesize” map overlays, projections, etc. The holistic approach of viewers gathered around reduced, scaled models while some knowledgeable individual covers salient points and fields questions, cannot be over-stressed.

A caution: scale reductions are usually“delicate” fabrications, easily damaged. There is seemingly an irresistible urge by those not familiar with modeling to “look with their hands” and pick up or touch small items in exhibits. This can be disastrous(usually is) and the feeble “Oh…I’m sorry…” is not much comfort to model creators after they have spent hours and hours assembling their creations with the aid of Krazy Glu and a jeweler’s loupe! The best insurance is a see-through cover and this should be factored into budgeting. Glass cases are best, and not beyond the ability of the average craftsman if you take it easy and use care. (Plate is best, but must be cut by professionals and is expensive. If you make up your own cases, use double-thick window lite, as it is called. You have to ask for it at most hardware stores or glass outlets.

Lucite (acrylic) is acceptable in some instances (use only ¼-in stock). Acrylic is more easily scratched however, and may haze with time. If you make a glass case for your display – use rabbitted wood frames if you know how to make them, or can get them made up for you. Almost as good, are cases assembled with “showcase cement.” You press seams directly together in a glass-to-glass bond. This cement used to be available from commercial glaziers. (This cement used to have arsenic in it too, so don’t be licking your fingers during assembly!) I have made glass cases for my ship models this way that are now over fifty years old, and as sound as the day they were “glued” together.

When demonstrating or “showing” scaled models of archeological sites, one of the popular laser pointer devices is great for pointing out features and key spots. In the case of the “Circle” model, I made up a separate handout keyed to the display to help answer questions and get viewers correctly oriented. Figure 2 is a close-up section from this handout.

I made my model by first making a simple box frame of 4x¾x22–inch pine stock. Screw, don’t nail, ends together so later you may disassemble and reassemble as needed. This frame was then centered roughly in a 24 x 24-inch square of ¾-inch plywood. (These stock sizes are available off-the-shelf at Home Depot, and their stock dimensions helped determine my dimensions!) I then poured my form full of plaster-of-paris. I used a lot of mixed-in wet newspaper scrap to bulk up the plaster and provide at least some reinforcing. This is not really necessary though.

I thus wound up with a 4x21x21-inch plaster block. The rough troweled upper surface became the exposed surface of the Miami Oolite Limestone, upon which I began my model. At my scale and considering this particular site, I was able to ignore elevation differences (the Dig Directors having been most chary of “sharing” data about the site in any event). My block fortuitously sloped just about right to the northern end as it was. On this plaster block surface I pasted a photocopy (in sections from my computer printer) at the 1:30 scale of the “Circle” and immediate surroundings. Figure 3 compares an overhead view (left) of the original dig with my model (right). The black-and-white scale board in both views is actual foot markers on the left side, while on the right, the corresponding scaled marker squares measure just 3/8ths- inch long! When the pasted photocopy pattern was dry, I fell to with power drill, hand drill, and wood carvers tools, and carved the exact replica of the entire aerial shot into the block. I did this with the long hose of a vaccum at the ready in my lap to periodically suck up obscuring chips and dust. Be careful if you work with plaster not to inhale the dust: it contains a known carcinogen. The remaining scraps of the mosaic were then soaked off, and the block stained an appropriate smudged grey with solutions of India ink.

I then built up the surrounding dirt embankments using papier-mâché and various art-craft formulations of clay and plaster for this purpose (available as proprietary products from art supply stores). By knowing how to dab the drying plaster surface with a damp cellulite sponge, one can duplicate surface textures and roughness of natural ground and stone. I then used acrylic paints to paint exposed strata and other aspects of the site. To finish this phase, I darkened the solution pits and the dug basins with more “shadow” etc. Figures 4 and 5 show how I raised and contoured the surrounding embankments and other details. As for instance, the whitish streaks and spots of exposed marine shells in the black midden faces. (With wet plaster and other art media, you cannot “dawdle” in your work but must form it deftly before it sets. You can add or delete later – but you cannot endlessly “play” with each batch, as the mix loses all strength in the “set”). Practice makes perfect.

Accurate details are the secret to good models. It takes years of experience and much patience to learn to do this, but if you persist you will eventually be rewarded for your efforts. Here’s how I did mine: since I had chosen a 1:30 scale I was more or less out of luck for off-the-shelf human figures from model stores. If you must have human figures (always a quick way for the viewer to relate to general scale of a model), go for a 1:32 scale: this is one standard modeler’s scale and many figures in lifelike renderings and positions are available at this scale. Nowadays model suppliers have not only the toy soldiers of yesteryear, but figures of all human activities, including work and construction activities, so you can find figures using shovels, trowels, wheelbarrows, kneeling, squatting, and so on both with and without hardhats and appropriate field gear and clothing – all perfect for conversion to archeological representations.

However all you really require is a few touches that accurately “set the stage” for relative eyeball scale, and the viewer’s mind will provide the rest. For instance, I made a tiny surveyor’s transit to scale out of kitchen toothpicks (Fig. 5) using a small discarded brass bushing I found in my tool box for the base plate and tripod head. I then made the sighting tube by cutting a section out of a small nail. I used an even smaller brad section to emulate the striding level atop the tube, held in place with Krazy Glu. At these scales, it is not possible to clamp the tiny assemblies: you must have a steady hand and sharp eye and much patience (!) and hold them immobile in your fingers till “set.” More than once you will need a razor blade to cut your fingers apart later if you use Krazy Glu!

I then sawed off just the point of a 6-penny nail and glued it to a length of thread. This was my transit plumb bob! Next, I cut up an aluminum beer can (I drank the beer first – to steady my hands for the task!). The thin stock in aluminum food cans is just right for metal tools and objects in model work: it bends and forms easily and looks very real. You can even scratch it lightly with fine steel wool if you want to show wear marks, etc. With the aluminum scrap I formed a shovel blade and a miniature “45-6 Marshalltown Trowel” (see Practical Hints No. 5 elsewhere on this Website). The tiny trowel – the preferred tool of fieldworkers the world around - with shank and rounded wood handle (toothpick stock), is my signature piece:just ½ in. long overall. (Fig. 6).

Next,I made a sifter such as the ones we actually used on the dig. (Fig. 4). I found a scrap of vinyl fly screen in the wastebasket at a local hardware store so I didn’t have to buy an outrageous amount. The little wood frame is just what it looks like: carefully formed and joined tiny boards. We used shaker sieves on long rods of rebar at 8/DA/12, which let us “whip” the sifters back and forth with ease on the flexible rods stuck into the ground. In the model my rods are cutoff pieces of paper clip.

Some basins at 8/DA/12 had isolated(unmodified) cobbles and sometimes clusters of cobbles in them when first uncovered. I used bits of fish tank gravel to emulate these cobbles in my model. (The cobbles in the basins are plainly visible in the original aerial photos we took and from which I worked). I then made up orange and blue marker-flags on thin wires, such as we had used in the field to designate different aspects of the various cavities. I used self-adhesive color label stock from Office Max as my “wrap around” flags. For suitable scaled wire staffs for the flags (paper clips were too thick), I pulled some strands out of my stiff-wire file brush in my toolbox. Down on the dig, we had used 5 gal. white utility buckets (periodically liberated from a Dunkin’ Donuts dumpster!) to transport dirt from excavated units to the sifter station. I was able to closely emulate these buckets by using white caps from small toothpaste tubes, which I further hollowed out by hand. I carefully attached bails to them – see for instance in Fig. 4.

My greatest inspiration came from lying on our beach! Waking one afternoon from a nose down nap in the sand, I was greeted by the close-up sight of the many “micro shells” mixed in with the sand of our famous “Gold Coast” strand down here. (I believe these are largely extinct microfossil species from the Pleistocene 25-ft. drop-off reef out about a ¼ mile, and which the perfidious Corps of Engineers is forever disturbing and dredging to provide “replenishment” for our ever-eroding beaches! Maybe some of these tiny shells are juveniles of modern species – I really do not know).

What is interesting though, is that many of them have tiny spiraled whelk shapes not at all unlike the largeStrombusand Busycon shells we found in profusion in the 8/DA/12 midden! And they are just the right size! And furthermore, many of them from their tumbling and transport along the beaches, are ground down to just their columellae – exactly like the columellae left behind by the ancient Tequesta at 8/DA/12 so long ago! With tweezers then, on a subsequent trip, I picked up a collection of these tiny shells in no time and placed some of them in piles on my model (just as they had tended to accumulate there during the dig) and a few down in the basins themselves – similar to the way we often found them. This provides a real finishing touch to the model.

Finally,over in the NW basin quadrant of my model, I selected two of the basins and using a lightly frosted sheet of thin rigid plastic (cover from a margarine tub lid!), and some green watercolor pigment, I created a thin translucent sheet of fake “water” that looks just like the basins used to look when we would arrive there after a hard night’s rain and the basins would be flooded and we would have to hand-bail them all before settling down to dig for the day. Using manicure scissors I carefully cut my “water” sheet to the exact outline perimeter of the tiny basin holes, and then dropped the cutout down into the basin. The result is a very realistic looking “water filled basin”. You can even see “through” this greenish layer (Fig. 7) to the blurred (fish tank) “cobbles” lying in the bottom of one basin….

The Devil, as they say, is in the details, and this was never more true than in model work!

There are many other interesting “relations” and things to see and discuss on my model. Many of the basins, as we recorded them during excavation, showed smaller “pilot holes”in their bottoms – and these too, I have shown in some of the basins if you look closely with the right lighting. One may trace out, if so inclined, the vastly over-hyped (IMO) “Maya Temple astronomical alignment”runs of holes (which I felt then, and continue to do so now, are only products of the fallacy of selective data picking). And among other things one can see the quite obvious fact that the basins are not all anyone shape (most writers on the “Circle” – including a large contingent who never dug there or only rarely visited the site – lol!) continually refer to the basins as “oval,” but this is clearly not the case. They probably get this from quoting one another as their “sources”, but of course, in science, there can never be any substitute for going direct to the actual source itself.

Figure 8 is interesting: on the left side is an actual shot across the SW quadrant of basins toward the entrance of what I have elsewhere called in my plats and drawings, the West Trench Extension (WTE). I am in fact, working in the entrance to this trench in the picture. On the right is a view from a closely similar aspect across the same arc of basins in the model – through the opening to the WTE can be seen the striped upholstery of my living room couch!

Another interesting area of 8/DA/12 lay in the SE quadrant (Fig. 9) – a deep irregular cavity with a fenestrated wall at depth. (In my personal field notes and maps, I have called this area the “Chaotic Zone”). You can clearly see the many tiny broken “whelk” shells and columellae fragments scattered about, which by way of scale, are only about ½ inch long here…

It had been my original intent to use this “Circle” model as a master form from which to create an elastomer casting mold (shell). This would permit easy “drawing” of duplicate casts for interested parties. However, this requires yet another retaining form to be made, and then the pouring of a “backup” plug as it is called, for the elastomer shell mold itself. Work, weight, time and effort go up geometrically in model work (I have done a lot of this in years past: somewhere in my stored plunder is a complete production model for a mold to cast an entire flexed adult Indian burial once uncovered on a dig of mine up in CT). As soon as I can get to my stuff again, I intend to back-cast this as museum-quality exhibit material! Ibid: if a Native Person should “object” to this as “disrespectful” to his/her ancestors, I shall ask in the best manner of the long ago debate between Thomas Huxley (“Darwin’s Bulldog”) and the puffed-up Rev. Wilberforce of the then Anglican Church: “Then tell me sir, if we are descended from monkeys, is it on your father’s or your mother’s side you claim this descent?” (Only in my case, I shall substitute “plaster of paris” for “monkeys!” LOL.

Our discipline (archeology) has been brought to its knees (IMO) by misplaced social activism and outside interference these days; the Miami Circle itself being no small example of this!

But as I was saying – I did not carry through here to make a final duplicating mold from this first approximation mold of the “Circle”. Once you start to add embellishments as I have briefly detailed above, it is then too late – and I was eager to see “how it would look” in the end. In this, the model was a success: it is almost like being once again in the middle of the original Miami Circle – only now you can almost hold it all in the palms of your hands! Of course, too, the model now takes up a lot of room in a small apartment,and I must decide on a final disposition for it.

Any suggestions?

North Miami Beach
January 3, 2001