In Chuck Blanchard’s mind, if you want to know the Calusa, you’ve got to be like the Calusa.

So, Blanchard, who died Aug. 17, 2024 at the age of 80, spent thousands of hours over three decades paddling his canoe across hundreds of miles of Southwest Florida’s estuaries, camping on mangrove islands, and observing, as he wrote, “land and water forms, water depths and currents, and effects of tides, winds, and weather.” In other words, he learned the natural phenomena that influenced everyday Calusa life. With knowledge gained from these trips, Blanchard published academic papers such as “Analogy and Aboriginal Canoe Use in Southwest” and “Matlacha Pass: Perspectives of Aboriginal Canoe Navigation.”

During his paddling days in the 1980s, Blanchard met Bob Edic, an anthropologist also interested in the Calusa. Edic then introduced Blanchard to University of Florida archaeologist Bill Marquardt, who had, himself, been researching the Calusa since the early ’80s – Marquardt would found and become the first director of the Randell Research Center in 1997.

In the late 1980s, Marquardt was planning The Year of the Indian, a multi-discipline program that would bring local students and adults to the Pineland site, where they could watch actual archaeological excavations. Having read some of Blanchard’s publications and learning that Blanchard had been a teacher in his home state of Connecticut, Marquardt realized that Blanchard would be a valuable addition to The Year of the Indian.

“Chuck Blanchard was instrumental in the success of the education program at Pineland in the early 1990s,” Marquardt said after hearing of Blanchard’s death. “We wanted not only to involve everyday people in supervised excavations and lab work, but also to get the heritage of the native Calusa Indians and the importance of the environment across to Lee County’s 4th graders. I could talk to adults, no problem, but I had no experience teaching 10-year-olds. So, I hired Chuck and Bob Edic to be the education coordinators, and we teamed up with Lee County’s Environmental Education program. We were able to bring out literally thousands of school kids, and we trained more than 600 teachers.”

So, Blanchard and Edic created an archaeology curriculum for Lee County schools, and Blanchard spent countless hours in classrooms and guiding students around the Pineland site, opening their minds to the science of archaeology and the history of the Calusa.

“Right up front, Chuck said it was important to go to the classrooms ahead of time and talk to the kids about what they were going to see when they came to Pineland,” Marquardt said. “By explaining that archaeology is about learning, not about finding things, the kids were less likely to get the idea that it’s about treasure hunting. Chuck was right.”

Marquardt next suggested that Blanchard write a “popular” book about Southwest Florida archaeology. The result, published in 1995, was New Words, Old Songs, which takes readers on a fascinating journey, from the last Ice Age, when the area’s Paleo-Indians hunted bison, mammoth, and giant armadillos, to the last, bitter days of the Calusa in the mid-18th century, 250 years after first contact with Europeans.

Archaeology, though, was only one of Blanchard’s occupations. He was also a published short story writer and poet, a magazine columnist, theater critic, piano teacher, and a much-traveled professional musician, or, as he referred to himself, a “piano minstrel.” In the 1970s, he spent five years playing gigs in London and Amsterdam; returning to Connecticut, he was the featured pianist and entertainment director for 16 years at clubs in Hartford and West Hartford, all the while touring New England with his band, the Mad Hatter Jam Session; when he was in Southwest Florida for archaeological projects, he played on weekends at PJ’s Seagrille in Boca Grande.

Clearly, Chuck Blanchard was a man of many talents, but he will be most remembered by Southwest Florida’s archaeology community as the bearded guy in the floppy hat who paddled the area’s estuaries, getting in touch with the ways of the Calusa and sharing what he learned with kids and adults alike.