A WEIRd Tale: 2,500 Years of Fishing in an Everglades Slough

Summary

In 1968, a dredging project alongside the Anhinga Trail in Taylor Slough, Florida unearthed an unusually large collection of worked bone objects. Peat deposits in the slough afforded excellent preservation conditions – some of the bone tools still contain wooden shafts and pitch. Sometime after its discovery, the collection was split between different institutions and lost. This important collection has recently been relocated and rejoined and is described in this paper. The assemblage consists of over 250 worked bone artifacts including socketed bone points, bipoints, hafted shark teeth, utilized stingray spines, and utilized sawfish teeth.

The Anhinga Trail site was an important place on the landscape that was used for over two-thousand years. During the dredging project, a pine log structure was encountered that was likely a fish weir or raised platform. The worked bone assemblage contains objects that are suggestive of procurement strategies well-suited to fishing from a weir or platform. The bone artifacts are currently being studied with 3D scanning, computed tomography (CT) scanning and reflectance transformation imaging (RTI) to better understand manufacture techniques and use-wear patterns. This paper considers the role of these bone items in the long-lived subsistence technology and practice in pre-Columbian South Florida.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Recent Considerations of Coastal Subsistence Practices in the Southeastern USA

Keywords

Spatial Coverage