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18 December 2020 Invisible Things Forgotten: A Multi-Proxy Study of Wetland Plant Use at a Precolumbian Village on the Gulf Coast of Florida
Kendal Jackson, Thomas J. Pluckhahn, C. Trevor Duke
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Abstract

Herbaceous wetland plant resources have been widely cultivated and utilized by Indigenous peoples throughout North America since at least the early Holocene. Archaeologists and ethnographers, along with traditional knowledge holders, have documented and reconstructed deep histories of interaction between human communities and coastal plants that provide dietary carbohydrates, medicinal compounds, and craft-fiber. On the Florida peninsula, as elsewhere, paleoethnobotanical researchers face challenging preservation conditions and, despite the ubiquity and vastness of coastal wetlands, the resident flora are conspicuously underrepresented in the archaeological record. In this study, we work toward the recognition of wetland plant use on the Gulf Coast of Florida by integrating analyses of archaeo-molluscan, microfaunal, and palynological assemblages from stratified shell-midden deposits at a village and civic-ceremonial center occupied across the first millennium AD. We identify four particular herbaceous wetland plants as likely subsistence, medicinal, and technological resources. In a brief discussion, we propose that coastal wetland flora likely played key roles within late-Holocene maritime resource intensification, civic-ceremonial aggregation, and village-coalescence.

Kendal Jackson, Thomas J. Pluckhahn, and C. Trevor Duke "Invisible Things Forgotten: A Multi-Proxy Study of Wetland Plant Use at a Precolumbian Village on the Gulf Coast of Florida," Journal of Ethnobiology 40(4), 569-589, (18 December 2020). https://doi.org/10.2993/0278-0771-40.4.569
Published: 18 December 2020
JOURNAL ARTICLE
21 PAGES

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KEYWORDS
bycatch
coastal archaeology
Florida Gulf Coast
Pollen analysis
shell midden
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