Relatedness, Circularity, and Place-Centeredness in Belle Glade Artifacts: Reevaluating South Florida Collections from an Ontological Framework

Summary

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Museum collections provide a quintessential database for archaeological studies, yet they are often overlooked in favor of new excavations that eventually add to museum collections. While new excavations provide us valuable insight into the communities of the past, reevaluating existing collections can provide us with entirely new interpretations of the past, especially in light of new methodological technologies and new theoretical frameworks. In this paper, I provide a case study on how reevaluating collections with new theories and methods can shed an entirely different light on the past. The Florida Museum of Natural History curates many collections associated with the Belle Glade culture of South Florida. Previous Belle Glade studies have been limited and focused primarily on economics and subsistence. Reevaluating these collections in terms of an ontological framework provides a whole new understanding of the peoples that once dwelled in the Kissimmee-Okeechobee-Everglades watershed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• "Re-excavating" Legacy Collections   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24638