OBITUARY

Dan D. Laxson
1910-2002

Figure 1. Dan Laxson at Hialeah #4 in 1954. Courtesy of Sara Laxson

Smith.

Dan Denise Laxson passed away on September 2, 2002, at
age 92. He was the most productive archaeologist in southeast-
ern Florida for a period of twenty years, from the early 1950s
through the 1960s. Laxson salvaged information from sites
being destroyed in rapidly growing Dade and Broward counties.
His effort was voluntary, at a time when state and local govern-
ments paid no attention to the loss of archaeological sites. He
held several FAS offices, including Second Vice President in
1955, Secretary in 1958, and Executive Committeeman in 1953

 

and 1973,

Laxson was a disciplined worker. He limited
excavations to manageable size, published results
quickly, and deposited collections in museums.
Beginning in 1954, Laxson was a long-time member
of the Historical Association of Southern Florida
(HASF), serving as a Director in 1967 through 1971.
He taught archaeology at the Miami Museum of
Science in the 1960s. Throughout his work, he
obtained advice and assistance from archaeologist
Ripley Bullen.

Like much archaeological research in the 1950s
and 1960s, Laxson’s primary goal was to recover
diagnostic artifacts and to assign sites to culture
periods. He used archaeologist John Goggin’s
Glades sequence and ceramic types (Goggin 1950a,
1950b; Goggin and Sommer 1949). As was common
at that time, Laxson excavated 5 x 5 ft test units in 4-
or 6-inch levels. His work focused on “black dirt”
middens, many of which were former Everglades tree
islands that artificial drainage placed in the path of
expanding Miami and its suburbs.

Laxson was ahead of many Florida archaeologists
because he regularly collected zooarchaeological
remains. In the 1950s, he often had bones identified
by herpetologist Wilfred T. Neill, of Ross Allen’s
Reptile Institute, near Ocala. Noteworthy were
remains of sea turtles and sharks from tree island
sites, indicating that Indians transported marine foods
inland, apparently by dugout canoe via rivers and
sloughs. In the 1960s, Laxson donated many
zooarchaeological remains to the Florida State
Museum (FSM), in Gainesville (now the Florida
Museum of Natural History [FLMNH]). Laxson’s
collections formed the bulk of the museum’s early
zooarchaeological collections from southeastern
Florida. Today, they have Zooarchaeology Labora-
tory (ZL) accession numbers 3-5, 8-17, 26, 103, 140-
143, 145, and 341-344 (see below). From most of these same
excavations, Laxson donated sherds and other artifacts that
comprise much of the FLMNH artifact collections from Miami-
Dade County (Appendix I).

Born on February 21, 1910, in Atlanta, Georgia, Laxson
developed an early interest in radios. As a young man, he
earned an amateur radio license when the test included building
your own radio. He married in 1935 and worked for six or
seven years as a radio mechanic for Delta Airlines, in Atlanta.

 

VOL. 59(3-4)

THE FLORIDA ANTHROPOLOGIST

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER 2006