I Predict!

Well, now that second-guessing-time is apparently soon to be upon us here at the enigmatic Miami Circle Site (Experts plan 6-week blitz to discover Circle secrets," Miami Herald,10-01-99) I think I shall throw caution to the winds and make a prediction up front.

What good is a successful prognostication,if you cannot establish prognosticationhood? Of course, if you are "wrong" - why everyone knows just whom to ignore and ostracize! Lol... Ain't it the dangdest thing?

Ask Nostradamus, already yet!

My remarking more than a year ago on-site a faint (very! Lol) "reminiscence" - as we earthmovers sometimes put it, of the basin configurations and the axes and all we were finding as "invoking" (another favored archeological euphemism!) central Georgia and perhaps the late cultures in and around the Ocmulgee Old Fields Earthlodge region, having gone largely unremarked and uncommented upon at the time, I shall toot a bit louder on my horn this time around.

I predict that this new crew coming in plans (or they better!) to take a whole slew more of cores through the midden and outlying overburden here than was ever done before. If they don't they are just missing the boat! (That is a prediction,too - you got two of them here for price of one!)

The more I reflect on the Greater Miami Stone Circle Mystery Temple and Basin Ring here, the more I am convinced that we - all of us! - temple-ites, septic tank-ites,henge-ites, et al have been too busy trying to solve one thing (the basins themselves) when we ought to have been busy solving another thing (theoverlying midden). Too much attention has been expended on what is under the midden rather than what is over the basins! I am saying maybe "top down analysis" (I can thank my days on MadAve for that one!) maybe would provide some better control here.

If this midden were definitively described (and illustrated…!) then the text and section drawings might bring many chronological aspects more into sequence, and many physical parameters and clues as to past natural and artificial activities here might be resolved. Such knowledge could not help but frame the most reasonable hypotheses then to pursue about the remaining and ultimate mystery: the buried basins down below.

I urged strongly the whole time I was part of the field crew that we should be coring much more extensively than we ever did (with a view to even microanalysis of the overburden). In fact, to my knowledge there are only extant at this time from the earlier dig phases about five or six cores at most, and I took them all. Where they have wound up I do not know but hopefully they escaped the sequestering of the inventory instituted by the builder, as we understand. And to give credit where credit is due, I was first encouraged to this by an offsite friend of the proceedings: Don McNeill, marine sedimentologist of the Rosenstiehl School of Marine & Atmospheric Science (RSMAS) here locally, who urged strongly that cores should be derived for the entire site. In this I must also admit John Ricisak, Our Field Director, was favorably inclined as well - but as to the logistics of core pipe, preparation, compilation of a core log and other particulars I was pretty much on my own to gather materials and proceed. Don MacNeil and later Hal Wanlass of RSMAS kindly donated special thin-wall core tube from their stocks, and after several false starts, a hand driven ram to aid in this effort, too. I hand-serrated the tube section ends with a hack saw and drove them myself, withdrew, and sealed in the field and labeled them with notes inside and magic marker i.d. on tube exteriors, and at John's request left them in his agency vehicle for security.

Although a vigorous program of actively coring the whole site was not launched (I urged much greater activity here), we do have at least some half dozen cores extant around somewherehere now for the vanished midden overburden which lay over the circle. In fairness, too, it is to be noted that the minimal effort perhaps expended here was not all to be laid at the door of the Dig directors: the builder had peevishly instituted a rule in the closing phases of the earlier dig that we could not stray beyond the bounds of the Circle proper in our work so this meant I could not core out any distance from the heart of the site.

In Miami
Bernie Powell
October, 12, 1999
Nostradamus, II