A Massive Tequesta Cemetery

Southeast Florida’s largest known Native-American cemetery was discovered here in 2005.

The remains of more than 500 Tequesta remains were removed from this site to make way for downtown’s Whole Foods Market.  Most of the examined bones were dated from between eighteen hundred to two thousand years ago.

There is an untold story of collusion between the developers and certain City of Miami Officials to suppress this remarkable discovery. In 2005 Dr. Alison Elgart-Berry, the City of Miami’s first (and so far only) city archaeologist was fired when she began to petition for preservation of this site after recognizing the unique significance of this massive Tequesta cemetery.

“I was told [by planning department director Ana Gelabert-Sanchez] that we never fight the developer, we always try to work with them, apparently even if this means that hundreds of human burials will be destroyed in the process.”

Now, almost twenty years later, there is still no published archaeological report of these findings.

The Developers of this site were the MDM Group whose principals were Ricardo Glas & Luis Polenta

Over Five Hundred Human Remains Removed From this City Block

Above is a map of the footprint of the Met 3 development ( often referred to as the Miami One Site ) which shows the areas of burial. This map was submitted as part of a thesis called “Life in the Florida Everglades: Bioarchaeology of the Miami One Site”. by Cristina Echazabal. She studied the skeletal remains of 63 individuals from what is marked at the bottom right of thie map as Feature 164.

Bioarchaeology- Miami One Site