Determining the Impact of Major Storm Events on Ancient Peoples of Coastal Florida

Summary

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

For this project, I assess the potential effects that periods of increased storm frequency and intensity may have had on the lives and behaviors of ancient coastal Florida populations. Using sediment grain size analysis, storm periods were retrodicted and organized into regional storm chronologies for 5 lake bed sediment cores within the East and Central, Northwest, and North Peninsular Gulf Coast archaeological regions of the Florida coast. The storm periods were identified by signatures of increased particle size and platykurtic particle size distribution. The storm periods were then dated using a linear regression of radiocarbon dates taken at varying depths of the sediment core. The storm period chronology generated for each sediment core was compared alongside radiocarbon dates taken from across coastal Florida archaeological sites, which were used to infer periods of occupation for the individual sites, and for the archaeological region as a whole. Initial investigations show correlations between periods of increased storminess and periods of settlement abandonment. These correlations may aid in explaining the causes of settlement abandonment at these sites and reinforces the utility of particle grain size analysis for retrodicting ancient climate.

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): 25109