Stonehenge or Septic Tank? An American dilemma - Miami Circle poses challenge to Dade County politicians

National Review, Oct 11, 1999 by John J. Miller

Miami

On a September day last year, two archaeologists and a surveyor stared into a narrow 12-foot trench they had just dug and argued about what they were looking at. The archaeologists weren't sure, but the surveyor, T. L. Riggs, had no doubt. "That's Stonehenge in reverse," he said, pointing to four large holes cut into the exposed limestone bedrock. The two Dade County archaeologists, Robert Carr and John Ricisak, just rolled their eyes. They had worked with Riggs for years and knew him to be a reliable surveyor. They also knew that Riggs, a part-time Bigfoot-hunter, was given to flights of fancy. This appeared to be one of them.

To Riggs, however, it was a simple matter of geometry. He measured the arc of the four holes in the trench and calculated their center point at about 19 feet away in an area the diggers had not touched. Using a tape measure, he walked the perimeter of the circle he imagined to lie beneath the unexcavated dirt and spray-painted its circumference on the ground. Carr and Ricisak went to work with their shovels. To their surprise, Riggs was right. About two dozen holes had been cut into the bedrock, forming a circle on the south bank of the Miami River where it empties into Biscayne Bay. The circle-now popularly known as the Miami Circle-had a diameter of 37 feet. They had never seen or heard of anything like it. Neither had anyone else.

It may now cost Florida taxpayers up to $50 million to save it. Although most archaeologists believe the circle is evidence of a 2,000-year-old Tequesta Indian building, a bizarre preservationist movement spouting wilder theories has sprung up and drawn international attention. The first Miami Herald story on the circle improbably suggested that the Maya had built it. Others have called it a remnant of Atlantis, or even a corner of the Bermuda Triangle. New Age types regularly hold vigils nearby and have decorated the fence enclosing the circle with peace signs, flags of the world, and Christmas ornaments. Their efforts led Dade County to file an eminent-domain suit, and in October a jury will slap a price tag on the 2.2-acre lot. The county will then have 20 days to come up with the cash before the property reverts back to the developer, who wants to build a twin-tower apartment complex on the site. Local officials are scrambling to find money, and Gov. Jeb Bush has pledged several million dollars in state funds to save the circle.

There's only one problem: The Miami Circle may simply be the remains of an old septic tank.

That's the theory recently put forward by Jerald T. Milanich, an archaeologist at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville. "When I was at the site this spring, I was immediately skeptical," says Milanich. There is, in fact, a septic tank buried in the limestone just inside the circle's southern rim. It was put there in the 1950s to serve a small apartment building razed last year to make room for the new development. "Those holes look like they could be part of an overflow drain," says Milanich. "I've been in this business too long not to have a suspicious mind."

This is clearly a minority opinion, but it must be taken seriously-especially when tens of millions of taxpayer dollars are at stake. "Jerry is the expert on Florida archaeology," says Vin Steponaitis, a University of North Carolina archaeologist and past president of the Society for American Archaeology. And if Milanich is correct, Dade County's expected purchase of the site would make the Pentagon's $600 hammers look like a bargain.

Unfortunately, a judge placed the circle off-limits right after the county filed its suit in February. The developer, Michael Baumann, is still technically the owner, and he has not allowed any visitors. The small plot of land is full of weeds and surrounded by a chain-link fence. An armed guard sits outside the gate round the clock. It's possible to look down on the site from the top of a hotel parking deck or a drawbridge, but the circle itself was covered with protective fabric and gravel in August. The holes can't be seen.

Baumann purchased the lot for $8 million and says he has put nearly $7 million into it since then. He wants the county to pay him $50 million in compensation for his direct costs as well as lost profits. In September, a pair of county appraisers suggested that the property's real value is somewhere between $15 and $17 million.

Paying even a fraction of this sum to preserve an old septic tank, of course, can instantly turn a city into a global laughingstock. Politicians lose their

jobs over this sort of thing. Yet the scientists who have spent the most time on the site dismiss Milanich's claims. "There's not one shred of evidence that the circle is from a septic tank," says Ricisak, who studied old building plans to rule out the septic-tank idea. He also notes that no modern artifacts were found in the holes or the midden deposits covering them. The deposits themselves were carbon-dated to roughly a.d. 100. Moreover, the limestone inside the holes is coated with a thin crust formed by a chemical reaction that takes hundreds of years to occur. John Coker, a local plumber with 30 years of experience, called the septic tank's position inside the circle "totally coincidental." Riggs is more blunt: "You know what goes into septic tanks, don't you? That's what I think of the septic-tank theory."