Everglades Museum Manager Digs Deep on Calusa History

If you haven’t attended a Third Thursday talk at the Museum of the Everglades with museum manager Thomas Lockyear, you’re really missing something. Lockyear combines a researcher’s zeal (he’s got over 4,000 books at home) with the personality of a band frontman (which he was) to bring most any topic to life. On Thursday, November 21, in honor of Native American Heritage Month, Lockyear entertained and informed a standing-room-only audience with his take on the Calusa Indians in a lecture titled Florida’s First People.

Lockyear was upfront with his audience regarding his level of expertise on the subject.

"I preface these talks by saying I'm not an expert,” Lockyear said. “Part of the reason that I do these talks is to make myself learn things that I need to know more about. I am a lifelong learner. One of the things that I find myself doing is scheduling myself to do talks about things I don't know enough about.”

Lockyear condenses his voluminous research into an hour-long talk that manages to keep his audience enraptured, mixing interesting research tidbits with his trademark sense of humor. Consider Lockyear’s description of the Calusa’s physical appearance.

“They weren't built like farmer guys,” Lockyear said, "they were just tall and lean and muscular. The male models of the indigenous people.”

How about his description of the Calusa’s diet and lifestyle. 

“The mainstay was small fish,” he said, "but they supplemented their diet by shooting a deer here and there. They would pick stuff from the trees, but they did not have agriculture. The Calusa were apparently harvesting all these clams, having huge clam bakes. Elvis was there. It was crazy."

Lockyear said there is a misconception about the great height of the Calusa.

"They had a pure protein diet,” he said. "They had a steady diet of fish and seafood. They were muscular, healthy, 5’8”-5’10”, while the average Spanish man coming in with all this armor was 4’10”-5’2”. This is why, in the writings of these soldiers, they're described as a race of giants. They weren't necessarily giants, but they were close to a foot taller than these other guys." 

Lockyear said the Calusa had an organized army.

“When you have a standing army,” he said, "it's pretty easy to tell the Tequesta Indians, ‘You better bring us some cool stuff, or we're going to send the army to take some.’ They had lots of these little built up coastal villages that were pretty much well-oiled machines. Lots of people living there. They had fish farms, these vast nets where they're channeling fish in, and they're catching lots of fish because, after all, they needed enough fish to feed an army. Fishing was a community enterprise.”

Lockyear said he isn’t alone in studying the Calusa.

“There are a bunch of people that have spent or are spending a lifetime digging through trash heaps,” he said. “That is one of the best ways to understand who humans are and what they do. Some examples of their tools. The big conch shells could be everything from a hammer to an axe to a weapon. You get pieces of scallop shell that were used as digging tools and hoes. Drills made from the center core of some of these things. They really worked very, very well. I’ve tried some of this stuff myself.”

Lockyear used a replica saw made from a barracuda.

"I was pretty amazed by the barracuda jawbone saw,” he said. "My colleague said you can actually cut down a tree with that. I didn't cut down a tree, but I cut branches off trees, and the incision was just absolutely perfect."

Lockyear encourages anyone with even a passing interest in Calusa history to visit the Marco Island Historical Museum.

“We have a really amazing historic record of things that shouldn't have survived from Marco Island,” he said. “On Marco Island, in an anaerobic bog environment, there was not just wood, but fishing nets. We know what their fishing nets looked like because we found them. And now, granted, this was the 1890s and they didn't really understand the fact that when you pull that stuff out of the mud, it would disintegrate before your eyes. At the Marco Island Historical Museum they've recreated some of these scenes. 

"Captain Bill Collier, no relation to the founder of Collier County, Barron Collier, ran the trading post in Marco. In the early 1890s, he was digging up this fertile muck and started coming up with artifacts. The next thing you know, he’s sending a couple letters away. Anthropologist Frank Hamilton Cushing is sent down here as part of the Pepper-Hearst Expedition in 1895-1897. And Hearst is the Hearst of Hearst newspapers. These are the people that financed it. The artifacts were split evenly between the Smithsonian and the University of Pennsylvania.”

Lockyear is proud of the nickname he has given the expedition's most famous artifact, the Key Marco Cat.

“This is my phrase,” Lockyear said. "I always call it the King Tut of North America. They brought up over 4,000 artifacts from that site on Marco. And a lot of it is stuff that doesn't survive. It's wood. It’s rope. It's all these sorts of things.”

Lockyear said the Pepper-Hearst Expedition was greatly aided by their young photographer. 

“The photographer for the expedition was this guy Wells Sawyer,” Lockyear said. "It's very, very lucky. Because he was also a watercolorist. In the 1890s, being a photographer means that you've got this crate full of emulsified plates that you've got to keep in the dark. You've got to throw that big cloak over your back and slide it in there. And it takes however long to do this. And these Calusa masks are coming up, and they're in the sunlight. The colors are going away, and they're losing the colors. And he just kicks the camera to the side and starts watercoloring all these different masks and things. So we know the color scheme of these masks that they were pulling out of the muck because he was a watercolorist. A lot of the information was saved that way. Obviously, the Key Marco Cat is the most famous of the bunch.”

Lockyear said much is not known about Marco’s famous cat, currently on loan at the Marco Museum from the Smithsonian.

“I think it's neat,” he said, "but it's really hard to understand what this was. It's obviously an anthropomorphic panther. It's half human, half panther. But is it like a child superhero doll, or is it a god? There's no written record to go by.”

Lockyear also recommends reading material on the Calusa. A 1575 memoir by Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda, a Spanish shipwreck survivor, is at the top of his list.

“My favorite book that really tells what life with the Calusa was like is the Fontaneda memoir,” Lockyear said. "He was a shipwreck survivor down at the top of the Florida Keys at age 13. He watched the Calusa kill everybody else in his crew. But they just thought this 13-year-old kid was funny, and they kept him around. They liked him. They were nice to him. But then they beat him up and threatened him. He was with them for 17 years until Pedro Menendez, who was the first territorial governor of the Florida Territory from Spain,  came in 1575 and freed him. He actually lived a reasonable amount of time. And he lived long enough to write his memoir. He gives a list of all the different kings. He gives a list of all the different villages, all the other tribes that they were at war with.”

The Collier County Museums are open Tuesday-Saturday, 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM. Winter Holiday closures on Thursday, November 28 and Friday, November 29, Tuesday, December 24 and Wednesday, December 25, and Wednesday, January 1. Admission is free.