User:Donald Albury/Pine Island Canal

Draft article.

The Pine Island Canal (8LL34) is a canal, now heavily damaged, which crosses Pine Island in Florida from the Pineland Archeological District to Indian Field, a distance of about 4 km. The canal was dug about 500 to 1,000 years ago, and is believed to have been used as a canoe route. Much of the canal has been damaged or destroyed by development since the late 19th century.

Location
Pine Island is low lying, and its shores were largely covered by mangroves. One of the few places providing easy access to the interior of the island from the water was the group of shell mounds at what is now called the Pineland Site. Late nineteenth-century visitors to the Pineland area described a canal extending across Pine Island from the Pineland site. By the 1970s, however, much of the canal had been altered by development, and was in danger of disapearing.

The canal crossed Pine Island, connecting a group of archaeological sites known as the Pineland Site on the northwest side of the island with a couple of burial mounds and a shell key called Indian Field on the northeast side. The canal was 4 km long. The Pineland and Indian Field sites date to late-prehistoric and early historic times. The canal was likely dug 500 to 1,000 years ago, and possibly as early as 2,000 years ago.

Late nineteenth-century visitors Frank Cushing and Andrew Douglas described the Pine Island Canal at its western end at the Pineland Site as being 9 m wide and 1.5 to 2.5 m deep measured from the tops of the berms along both sides of the canal. By 1980 the canal through the Pineland Site had become a narrow irrigation ditch As the canoes used by the Indigenous peoples of Florida were on average only 40 cm wide, and had a draft of no more than 15 cm, the canal dimensions were ample for canoe use.

George Luer suggests that construction of the Pine Island Canal and of similar canals elsewhere in southern Florida are indications of the integration of the region under the Calusa.

The Pine Island Canal is one of several prehistoric canoe canals in southern Florida. The Mud Lake Canal (8MO32), which crosses the base of Cape Sable in Everglades National Park, is the best preserved of the canals. Nearby is the obscure Snake Bight Canal (8MO29). The Naples Canal (8CR59), in Naples, Florida, has been destroyed by development. Two canals connect the archaeological site at Ortona with Lake Okeechobee and the Caloosahatchee River. Another canoe canal, Walker's Canal (8WL344), has been described in Walton County, in the Florida Panhandle.

Ales Hrdlicka,

Charles Kenworthy (1883), M. H. Simons (1884), Andrew E. Douglass (1881–1885), Clarence Moore (1905), and R. D. Wainwright (1918) wrote about Pineland.