The Old Vero Ice Age Site Excavations — Vero Beach, Florida

The Old Vero Ice Age Site excavations were the first controlled dig in about a century at the canal bank in Vero Beach where the Vero Man bones surfaced in 1915. The University of Utah Press summarizes the project in one line: recent construction near the site resulted in new archaeological work being completed from 2014 to 2017. The seasons were organized by the Old Vero Ice Age Sites Committee, a local nonprofit group, with Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute of Erie, Pennsylvania, as the first academic partner and Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute leading by 2016.

The work took place on the bank of the Main Relief Canal behind Indian River County Administration Building B, on county land near the Vero Beach airport. Archaeologist Andy Hemmings, a University of Florida trained specialist on the Mercyhurst faculty, ran the trenches day to day, and James Adovasio, director of the Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute, served as principal investigator.

The Indian River Guardian reported in January 2014 that the Old Vero Ice Age Sites Committee was organized by local residents in late 2009, after an engraved Ice Age bone from the Vero area drew national attention. A second push came from public works: Vero Beach 32963 reported that the committee mobilized when the county proposed a stormwater treatment center that would have poured tons of concrete over the Vero Man site.

Preparation took years. In early 2012, according to the Guardian, a team from Texas ran ground penetrating radar along the canal and found a large mass underground where the original bones had come out. On October 1, 2013, committee leaders and Hemmings briefed the Indian River County Commission, and Vero News reported a $400,000 budget, with the committee raising money to match Mercyhurst's contribution and digging set for January through May. Hemmings told commissioners that during the Pleistocene the ocean shore was 50 miles east of today's Vero beaches and the water table much lower, leaving the site, then a small lake, as a gathering point for people and animals.

The first Vero season opened on January 6, 2014, the Guardian reported. Heavy equipment cut a hole about seven feet deep, 60 feet by 24 feet, and a Weather Port shelter went up over it with sump pumps to keep the pit dry. Vero News reported that around 720 yards of dirt were removed near U.S. 1 and the canal, that the spot was chosen as the closest workable ground to the 1915 excavation, and that the season would run until May 9.

By March 2014 the crew had scraped down to an ancient surface the team called the Melbourne layer, Vero Beach 32963 reported. Volunteers, including Indian River Charter High School students, screened a spoil pile nicknamed Mount Vero for stone flakes. The paper listed finds from the first weeks: complete ladybugs, beetle parts, the head of a big ant, seeds, small fragments of a mastodon or mammoth skull and a piece of ivory. Hemmings credited the alkaline soil above an underlying shell layer for preserving such fragile material at Vero, and summer rain set the season's end.

In a December 2014 release reported by the Indian River Guardian, Mercyhurst said the first Vero season had produced burned fragments of bone, some with cut marks, that Adovasio said could only be the work of human beings. Radiocarbon dating of the soil holding much of that material reached back 13,000 to 14,000 calendar years, which Adovasio said made Vero the oldest terrestrial archaeological site in Florida. The crew also reached a buried soil about 19,000 years old, the target for the 2015 season, and recovered a bone tentatively identified as a dire wolf.

The team first presented the Vero results in November 2014 at the 71st Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Greenville, South Carolina. The Florida Museum of Natural History records radiocarbon ages of about 8, 12 and 19 thousand years from stacked ancient soils at the site. NPR reported in February 2015 that the first year at Vero yielded a human artifact believed to date back at least 11,000 years, plus charred remains of a dire wolf and an extinct horse on a lower level, and noted that these findings were preliminary and not yet peer reviewed.

The project changed hands in 2015. Vero News reported on November 19, 2015, that Mercyhurst had withdrawn about two months earlier for budgetary reasons after funding about 40 percent of the Vero dig, while Hemmings and Adovasio stayed on in some capacity and talks moved ahead with FAU Harbor Branch near Fort Pierce. The same report listed grants of $50,000 that year and $350,000 planned for the next, public donations of about $300,000 a year, and roughly 5,000 people briefed by volunteers at the Vero site. Finds described by then included traces of possible fire pits, chert flakes, and a strand of braided string, burned slightly, dated to 8,000 years ago. Randy Old, then a Vero Beach City Council member, sat on the committee's board.

Harbor Branch led the 2016 Vero season. Florida Atlantic University announced on May 11, 2016, that its archaeologists had found bones of an extinct bison, 13,000 to 14,000 years old, just 10 feet below the surface late in the season, identified from an upper molar thought to be Bison antiquus. The bones went to the FAU Ancient DNA Lab at Harbor Branch. In February 2017 the committee opened its fourth excavation season, Vero News reported, with about 1,500 volunteers and public tours at the northeast corner of the Indian River County Administration Complex.

The full results arrived in 2024 as The Old Vero Site (8IR009): One Hundred Years Later, The 2014 to 2017 Excavations, by Adovasio, Hemmings and F. J. Vento. The Project MUSE record lists appendices that include an Old Vero Site species master list, pollen analyses, ancient DNA analysis of vertebrate fauna and a metagenomic survey of eDNA. The publisher's summary says the volume uses the new data to conclude that Sellards's century-old claims about the Vero human bones are not supported, and that those remains were intrusive from a later time horizon.

That verdict differs from the tone of the early Vero press releases, which in 2014 cast the dig as proof that Sellards was right. The book addresses the human skeletal remains specifically, while the dated soils, charcoal, bison and dire wolf bones recovered between 2014 and 2017 remain the record of what lay along the old creek at Vero. The Florida Museum notes that no collecting or excavating is allowed at the Vero Canal Site without authorization from the City of Vero Beach.