The Mystery of the Miami Circle. 1/5

The Mystery of the Miami Circle
BBC2 9.00pm Thursday 25th January 2001

Archaeologist, Bob Carr, stands in the middle of the Miami Circle July 1998, downtown Miami, Florida. Six apartment blocks have just been demolished, to allow the construction of two brand new 40-storey skyscrapers. As construction workers prepare the site, they notice a strange phenomenon in the ground - a perfectly preserved circle of large holes, almost 13 metres across. What they had stumbled upon would generate huge excitement and controversy: either they had unearthed a rare and mysterious 2,000 year old Indian site - or a 1950s septic tank

or an ancient inverted American Stonehenge or a unique Mayan village in North America. For a while theories ranged far and wide. But finally, after examining the strategically-placed holes, and the range of artefacts found around the circle - stone tools, shark bones, axe heads - archaeologists began to believe that this was a genuinely unique site - the remains of a mysterious forgotten tribe called the Tequesta.