254 THE FLORIDA ANTHROPOLOGIST

2006 VOL. 59(3-4)

 

 

Figure 2. Artifacts salvaged by Laxson from a Seminole burial at Hialeah #4 and repatriated to the Miccosukee Tribe in 2003.

During World War II, he served for three years as a Navy
Reserve radioman on a tug boat on the Mississippi River.

Laxson loved warm weather. According to his daughter,
Sara Laxson Smith, one of her father’s ambitions was “to live
in shorts” (personal communication, 2004). In pursuit of that
dream, Laxson, his wife, and two children moved to Miami in
1947. He was 37 years old. There, he worked as a radio
mechanic for Eastern Airlines, a job he would hold for almost
30 years.

In 1950, the Laxson family moved to a little Mackle
Brothers house in the booming city of Hialeah. Laxson already
was interested in history and minerals, when a friend introduced
him to a nearby archaeological site, which piqued his curiosity.
It was the now-destroyed Nichols Site (a.k.a. Nicholas Site)
(8DA57), where Laxson reportedly found a cache of queen
conch lip artifacts associated with two burials in June 1951
(Carr and Reiger 1980:67).

Laxson began formal excavations in Hialeah in 1952, when
he and three others founded the Tequesta Archaeological
Society (TAS). The next year, he was elected to the FAS
Executive Committee at the Society’s Sth Annual Meeting, held
in Gainesville. In February 1954, he helped arrange the FAS
6th Annual Meeting, in Coral Gables, hosted jointly by HASF
and the University of Miami. In 1956, TAS became a chapter

of FAS, and it hosted the 13th Annual Meeting of FAS in Coral
Gables in 1961. The chapter re-organized in the late 1960s,
becoming the Miami-West India Archaeological Society and
continuing its FAS affiliation.

In the 1950s, when Laxson was in his forties, he tested
approximately 20 sites in the Miami area. Appendix I lists
these projects and museum collections generated by them.
Laxson began by investigating several black dirt middens. At
Hialeah #1 (8DA75), he found sherds diagnostic of the Glades
II and III periods. The Glades II sherds included Key Largo
Incised, Matecumbe Incised, and un-named incised (called
“unique incised”) rim sherds, the latter with a zig-zag design
(Laxson 1953a:Figure 2).

These incised rim sherds attracted the attention of Bullen,
who thought that they resembled decorated pottery from Cayo
Ocampo, Cuba. In an article co-authored with Laxson, Bullen
pictured these sherds and drew parallels between them (Bullen
and Laxson 1954). Additional finds of zig-zag incised rim
sherds were soon noted, such as at Grossman Hammock
(Brooks 1956:42, Figure 1C), the Marine Air Station and
Tamiami Airport sites (Laxson 1957b:17-18, 19), the Miami
Springs and Tamiami Trail #3 sites (Laxson 1959b:35), and the
Cheetham Site (Laxson 1962:3). Laxson continued to suggest
that the zig-zag incised design could reflect contact with Cuba.