The Black Drink

"The Black Drink" was a holy ritual beverage fermented and brewed by ancient tribes in the Southeastern United States, especially Florida and Georgia. Each tribe had its own special formula, but the concept seemed to coexist simultaneously amongst many different groups of Native Americans. The predominant ingredient in its mixture of herbs was roasted leaves and stems of Ilex vomitoria, or Yaupon Holly.

The Black Drink was served in large communal cups, sometimes made from whelk shells and sometimes in ornately decorated ceremonial vessels. According to ethnologists who claim to know such things, tribal councils were served the sacred drink in order of the precedence of individuals present, with important visitors getting the first taste. Some scholars say the practice was to induce ritual vomiting, while other accounts make no mention of it.

According to Wikipedia:

The yaupon leaves and branches used for the black drink were picked as close to the time of its planned consumption as possible. After picking they were lightly parched in a ceramic container over fire. The roasting makes the caffeine soluble, which is the same reason coffee is roasted. After browning, they were boiled in large containers of water until the liquid reached a dark brown or black color, giving it its name. The liquid was then strained into containers to cool, until it was cool enough to not scald the skin, and drunk while still hot. Because caffeine is 30 times more soluble in boiling water than room temperature water, this heightened its effect. It was then consumed in a ritual manner. Its physiological effects are mainly those of massive doses of caffeine. Three to six cups of strong coffee is equal to 0.5 to 1.0 grams of caffeine; the black drink could have delivered at least this much and possibly up to 3.0 to 6.0 grams of caffeine.

In 1696, Jonathan Dickinson personally witnessed the Black Drink ritual as practiced among the Ais people of Eastern Florida. According to Dickinson, lower status men, women and children were not allowed to touch or taste the beverage. The chief and his associates sat around enjoying their Black Drink, smoking cigars and pipes, and ruminating amongst themselves for most of the day. By nightfall, the bowl that had held the beverage had been covered with skin to make a drum, and they then drummed, sang and danced until the wee hours of the night.

Analysis of relics found on Terra Ceia Island indicate that the Black Drink ritual was performed here as well. The New York Times noted in 2012 that "as recently as the Civil War, Southerners were known to use the black drink as a pick-me-up", though I am having trouble finding anything to back up this assertion myself. I do think it's interesting that our modern society developed an obsession with our own Black Drink, Coca-Cola,, and that my own love for weird herbal liqueurs like Jagermeister and Zwack seem also to resonate with this ancient tradition.

The Titusville Brains

In 1982, developers in Titusville were doing what they do best - bulldozing the environment to build more condos - when a backhoe operator realized he'd dredged up a scoopful of human skulls at the edge of an ancient pond.

Archaeologists were called in, and the bones were radiocarbon-dated to be between 7,210 and 7,320 years old. To their credit, the developers cancelled their plans to build over the pond site, and donated $60,000 worth of hydraulic pumps to aid the archaeologists in draining it for study. To date, only half the pond has been excavated but has so far yielded remains of 168 bodies - males and females of all ages, from infants to about 60 years old.

On the heartwarming side, the remains of the children were buried with their toys, some of them still tightly clutching them, according to reports. I haven't read anything where anyone points out that already-dead people don't tightly clutch things.

(Okay, not so heartwarming. The heartwarming part was supposed to be the idea that kids back then had toys at all.)

Less heartwarming: the datum that almost all the bodies were held down with sharpened stakes. The smart guys say this must have been done to prevent the bodies from floating to the surface and keep them down. To me, it sounds more than a little creepy. And toys aside, it seems life for these people wasn't much of a party. One 15-year-old had congenital spina bifida, as well as a missing foot with a stump that had healed. On the other hand, it does seem to confirm that the society he was part of took great effort to protect him and support him, since he was almost certainly paralyzed below the waist and could not possibly have lived to be 15 in a more primitive tribe.

They ate pretty good, though: debris onsite indicated they ate white-tailed deer, raccoon, opossum, birds, fish and shellfish, and stomach contents revealed perfectly preserved seeds from wild grapes, elderberries and prickly pear fruit. The Windover Archaelogical Site, as the area is now called, has been called "one of the most significant archaeological sites ever excavated" because of the rare window it's given modern man into ancient Florida life.

Windover isn't the only such water-burial site, by the way. We've previously here delved into the skeletons of Lake Okeechobee, which no one seems to have made a connection with the similar setup in Titusville. There are also underwater-peat-burials in North Port's Little Salt Spring and Warm Mineral Springs, some of which go back even further to 12,000 years ago. According to Wikipedia:

Robin Brown notes in connection with these underwater burials that many Native American groups have a tradition that spirits of the dead are blocked by water. William McGoun suggests that a "water mortuary cult" may have been widespread in southern Florida from Paleoindian times into the historic period.

Now, see, that again strikes a creepy chord: why in the world would these people want to keep the spirits trapped underwater? I know, I know, primitive people can't be faulted for believing primitive things, and hey, these professors are probably way off the mark with their guesswork anyway. No one today really knows what was going on here and why these people did what they did. It's one of those "you had to be there" things, I suppose.

But what makes the Windover site so special is that the brains of the corpses were often preserved as well, which was something so unprecedented that the archaeologists, upon opening the skulls, didn't know at first how to identify these things that were inside. Human brains couldn't possibly have survived intact for thousands of years, they thought, and they thought wrong.

The brains are in storage in various labs now, waiting for the day that technology catches up to the idea of, just possibly, reading what is stored on those brains like an old unearthed cassette tape or hard drive.

Beachcombing

If you, like me, are interested in everything and have a tendency to focus on little details that the common man routinely misses, you probably, also like me, love beachcombing. With every passing moment, the ocean waves bring new fragments of flotsam and jetsam ashore from the sea, and you never know what you'll find.

Shells, of course, are the most common treasures. It never ceases to amaze me how many seaside locations have stores selling bags of seashells, not even especially dazzling ones. I just want to shake both the vendors and the customers and shout, "You're at the freaking OCEAN! You don't have to BUY SEASHELLS!!"

Sea glass is particularly fun to collect, for both ornamental and historic value. As broken glass finds its way into the ocean, what was the pollution of our ancestors becomes, over time, perfectly polished and frosted smooth nuggets of color. You can easily identify the source of many pieces - the recognizable "Coke bottle green" from old Coca-Cola bottles, for instance, and the tell-tale cobalt blue that almost always means Milk of Magnesia. Extremely rare colors include pink (often from Depression-era glass like Carnival Glass), teal (often from Mateus wine bottles), yellow (often from old Vaseline containers), and red (often from old beer bottles or nautical lights.) Orange is the rarest color of all, reportedly showing up only once per 10,000 pieces. Black sea glass is usually from very ancient pirate-era bottles that had iron slag added during production.

I haven't heard of anyone fetishizing "sea plastic" in same manner, but while surveying the area approaching the North Atlantic Garbage Gyre, I retrieved a staggering amount of tiny bits of colorful plastic, similarly buffeted by the elements.

Pottery shards are more common than you'd expect, and it's awe-inspiring to gaze on a piece of an ornate china plate and imagine the events that transpired on the track of time that led it to be held in your hand, right where you are sitting now.

And naturally, pirate treasure is what we all really want to find accidentally while walking our schnauzers, don't we? It really does happen. Spanish doubloons, antique buttons and bullets, and ancient salt-encrusted nautical bric-a-brac frequently washes up along Florida's "Treasure Coast". Some define the "Treasure Coast" as being Indian River, St. Lucie, and Martin, and Palm Beach counties, but I would logically extend the definition all the way up the coast to include St. Augustine.