The Old Vero Ice Age Site Excavations in Vero Beach, Florida

The Old Vero Ice Age Site excavations were the 2014 to 2017 scientific digs at the Vero Canal Site in Vero Beach, the canal bank where human bones were found with Ice Age fossils a century earlier.

The University of Utah Press summarizes the project in one line: recent construction near the site resulted in new archaeological work being completed from 2014 to 2017. The Florida Museum of Natural History places the site within the City of Vero Beach in Indian River County, southeast of the Vero Beach municipal airport, and says scientific excavations at the Vero Canal Site did not resume until 2014, when a crew from Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute led by C. Andrew Hemmings conducted a very controlled, archaeological-style operation on the south side of the canal. The earlier Vero dig the museum describes, a screening project reported by Weigel in 1962, recovered about 1100 identifiable specimens but no human fossils in Stratum 2.

The Vero Beach work was organized with the Old Vero Ice Age Sites Committee, which Florida Atlantic University says has overseen the project since 2010, conducts regular tours during active digs, coordinates volunteers and works to raise funding. In its May 2016 release on the Vero dig, FAU named James M. Adovasio as principal investigator and Andrew Hemmings as lead archaeologist.

The Vero dig grew out of a century-old argument over whether people at Vero lived alongside Ice Age animals.

The University of Utah Press explains that Elias Sellards brought the Old Vero Site to prominence by claiming that the human remains discovered there were contemporary with Pleistocene fauna, the first serious challenge to the belief, widely accepted until the Folsom discoveries in 1926, that humans had not entered Florida before the Holocene. The Florida Museum gives the Vero Beach background: the site was exposed by a drainage canal built by the Indian River Farms Company, the bone-bearing deposit extended for over 300 m along the canal, and F. C. Gifford found the first fossils in the canal bank in 1913.

The trigger for new digging at Vero was practical, since the press summary ties the new work to recent construction near the site. The Florida Museum reports that the 2014 crew located an area close to Sellards' original area where coring and ground-penetrating radar revealed preserved undisturbed strata representing his Strata 2 and 3. In FAU's December 2015 release, Adovasio called the Vero dig a taxpayer-funded project that needed to educate the public.

The first Vero season, in 2014, was a Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute dig led by Andrew Hemmings on the south side of the canal.

According to the Florida Museum, the area excavated by the 2014 Mercyhurst field season approached the Holocene-Pleistocene boundary, and the museum's Vero Canal Site page states that ongoing excavations by the group in 2015 would proceed deeper into the Pleistocene. Radiocarbon dating of ancient soil layers at the Vero site revealed ages of about 8, 12 and 19 thousand years before present in stratigraphic superposition, so the deposits span the Holocene-Pleistocene boundary and extend to the Wisconsin glacial interval.

The museum describes Stratum 2 at the Vero Canal Site as a series of thin layers of sand and silt, primarily thought to be a stream or pond deposit, with the lower sands probably deposited by wind under a drier climate during a glacial interval. Its faunal list for the Vero site includes extinct species such as Bison antiquus, Canis dirus, Mammut americanum and Mammuthus columbi.

The best documented find of the later Vero seasons is a bison molar from 2016.

Florida Atlantic University announced on May 11, 2016, that archaeologists from its Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute had uncovered what they believe are the bones of a 13,000 to 14,000 year old extinct bison at the Old Vero Man Site in Vero Beach, just 10 feet below the surface during the final stretch of the 2016 excavation. The team identified the animal using an upper molar thought to be representative of Bison antiquus, and the bone was found below a layer that contained material from the Pleistocene. Adovasio said bones like this had never been found on land as part of a calculated archaeological effort, since others had been found underwater, in sinkholes or streams, and Hemmings said the find meant people were known to have been in Vero Beach at that time.

The same release lists other 2016 finds at the Vero site: bones of small mammals, slivers of bones from large mammals that could have come from mammoth, mastodon, sloth or bison, and, earlier in the excavation that began in late February, pieces of charcoal and the head of a fly. The Vero bison bones were moved to FAU's Ancient DNA Lab at Harbor Branch, which the university says was established in 2011.

Florida Atlantic University's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute took over the Vero dig through a partnership announced on December 15, 2015.

The FAU partnership announcement said the Vero project, located on the Treasure Coast in Vero Beach, would be overseen by Harbor Branch and FAU's Department of Anthropology, that Adovasio and Hemmings, who had led excavation for the past two years, would continue managing the dig, and that site preparations would begin in January 2016 with digging in February. Committee chair Randy Old thanked Mercyhurst University for its work at Vero. Other collaborators named were scientists in the Harbor Branch ancient DNA lab, who would process some recovered bones, and Indian River State College, which would provide ancient DNA soil analysis and student volunteers.

On March 2, 2016, FAU reported that archaeologists, students and volunteers were again searching for clues into Vero Beach's ancient past, with Adovasio and Hemmings now housed at Harbor Branch. A May 9, 2016 FAU release said members of the Society of American Archaeologists would visit the Old Vero Site that month as part of the society's 81st annual conference in Orlando. The seasons line up as follows in the sources re-checked for this Vero Beach page.

The 2024 book on the Vero dig concludes that Sellards's claims are not supported by the evidence and that the human remains at the site were intrusive from a later time horizon.

The full results arrived in 2024 as The Old Vero Site (8IR009): One Hundred Years Later, The 2014 to 2017 Excavations, by James M. Adovasio, C. Andrew Hemmings and F. J. Vento, a 288-page volume from the University of Utah Press. The Project MUSE record of the Vero volume lists appendices on geoarchaeological investigations, use-wear analysis of chipped stone artifacts, an Old Vero Site species master list, pollen analyses, ancient DNA analysis of vertebrate fauna and a metagenomic survey of eDNA. The publisher says the authors provide the data to settle the matter definitively, as critics of the original Vero work had argued.

The book's verdict concerns the human remains from Vero, and it reads differently from the 2016 FAU release, in which Hemmings said people were in Vero Beach at the time of the bison. The Florida Museum notes that no access, for collecting or excavating, is allowed at the Vero Canal Site without proper authorization of the City of Vero Beach. Last verified: October 15, 2026, with this Vero excavation account re-read against the four FAU news releases, the University of Utah Press and Project MUSE book records and the Florida Museum site page.