First Floridians to La Florida: Recent FSU Investigations

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "First Floridians to La Florida: Recent FSU Investigations," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Florida is home to some of the oldest Pleistocene and Colonial period archaeological sites in the Americas. This rich record demonstrates that past Floridians actively engaged with major long-term environmental shifts, hurricanes, and neighboring cultures in nuanced and complex ways that were accentuated by the arrival of European populations. However, Floridian archaeology is challenging due to poor organic preservation, poor separation of components, poor site visibility, and modern site destruction from looting, development, and sea level rise. Further, much of the early cultural record was submerged offshore by the more than 130m of sea level rise from approximately 21,000-5,000 years ago, meaning that we know little about how early people may have used the coasts. New methods of modeling and analysis hold great promise for mitigating these challenges and providing insight about how past Southeasterners lived and adapted to their changing worlds. The archaeologists in this session ask new questions of curated assemblages, analyze and interpret materials from recent excavations, and use new methods and techniques to shed light on some of Southeastern archaeology's most enduring problems.