Counting souls: Archaeologist investigates dead of 1928 storm
They are the ghosts of Port Mayaca. On that long-ago day in 1928, when the big water took them, the world was a different place.
Most of them didn’t have a telephone, or a car, or even a radio when the storm hit. And few could have imagined the orange box on a stick, filled with strange noises and images, bolted to a tire, that a young archaeologist named Shawn Patch would roll across their graves 85 years later.
On Tuesday, Patch was using a futuristic tool to solve one of the great mysteries of our past: How many are buried here?
Good long article, read the whole thing. It seems unlikely that the true number of bodies will ever be known: they suggest many were burned and then deposited. It’s Florida so preservation of even those remains is likely to be pretty poor, unless it’s waterlogged for some reason. That’s too bad, it’s not a terribly famous disaster.
