Deering Estate — Tequesta Burial Mound & Cutler Fossil Site

The story

Most people drive down to Palmetto Bay to stroll around industrialist Charles Deering’s 1922 Mediterranean-style mansion and gawk at Biscayne Bay. What they walk right past—hidden under the dense canopy of the hardwood hammock—are two of the most significant and eerie archaeological sites in North America. The first is the Tequesta Cutler Burial Mound, a subtle five-foot elevation that serves as one of only two unearthed Tequesta burial sites in existence. It holds the ancestral remains of 12 to 18 Indigenous people from the Glades II-III periods. Local treasure hunters have been stupidly hacking into it with shovels looking for non-existent gold since the 1860s, completely blind to what was actually buried under their feet.

A few hundred feet away sits something even older and weirder: the Cutler Fossil Site. During a sinkhole excavation in 1979, archaeologists unraveled a prehistoric crime scene. Embedded in the limestone solution hole were the bones of Ice Age megafauna—mammoths, sabre-toothed cats, and giant California condors—inextricably mixed with charcoal and butchered animal bones bearing 10,000-year-old human tool marks. It stands as some of the oldest physical evidence of human life in South Florida.

There is a bizarre temporal vertigo to this soil. While 1920s Chicago millionaires were sipping gin and building faux-European grandiosity on the waterfront, ten thousand years of human survival and extinct predators lay quietly compressed in the earth just behind the palm trees.