Collective Action, Transport Costs, Watercraft Technologies, and the Engineered Ancestral Landscapes of Southern Florida

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Watercraft technologies have a long history in southern Florida. Archaeologists have recovered large vessels but historic documents also describe the Calusa utilizing complex ships able to transport large numbers of people. In addition to the sizable amount of labor that the people of the region invested in building such vessels, they also constructed canal systems throughout southern Florida. These canals not only facilitated movement within the bays and estuaries, but also connected the coast with a vast network of settlements in the region’s vast interior river and wetlands systems. These canal systems required not only labor to build, but also considerable maintenance to keep them free and clear for navigation. Further, the incorporation of navigable rivers into this system presented additional challenges and required detailed knowledge of hydrological engineering. Here, I consider how these systems emerged through collective and cooperative institutions. Subsequently, I examine the degree to which these constellations of technologies and engineered landscapes formed a kind of armature for the emergence of regional political systems of the kind observed in the area in the sixteenth century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Negotiating Watery Worlds: Impacts and Implications of the Use of Watercraft in Small-Scale Societies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 35723.0