Of Marsh and Mangal: Political/Historical Ecology in Tampa Bay’s Coastal Wetlands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Today, dense mangrove forests dominate the intertidal wetlands of the Tampa Bay Estuary System in west-central Florida. Following the publication of seminal ecology studies in the 1960’s, sub-tropical mangrove forests became a major focus of coastal environmental protection and restoration initiatives in Florida. Recent GIS-based historical research by the U.S. Geological Survey suggests that Tampa Bay’s coastal wetlands converted en masse from salt marsh to mangrove forest since the late-19th century. In this study, I explore the historical and political ecologies of this wetland conversion by ground-truthing historic survey mapping through geoarchaeological analyses of sediment cores, and by reconstructing how the americanization of the region has interacted with climate change and sea-level rise to produce an industrial seascape that is often mistaken and marketed as ‘natural’.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23825