How a Lake Okeechobee Basin Archaeological Complex Is Preserved through Wetland Restoration

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Lake Okeechobee Basin in Central South Florida was intensively modified by Belle Glades (1000 BCE–1700 CE) communities. The hunter-gatherer-fisher people engaged with complex landscape interactions and alterations, including terraforming in and around wetland sinks and tree islands through pit digging, mound construction, and more, forming an archaeological complex of a dozen sites. Landscape alterations continued by these and subsequent communities through Spanish colonization and beyond. During the early twentieth century, the basin was modified for agricultural use, including cutting canals, excavating borrow areas, cattle pasture, and orange grove creation through swales and water control structures. Recent wetland restoration conducted by the USDA-NRCS has been able to preserve an archaeological complex of sites around a large wetland sink not previously investigated archaeologically. Historic maps and aerial imagery, high-definition lidar-derived DEM maps, and twentieth-century landscape-use records were used to explore and preserve a large and interconnected archaeological complex previously unrecorded. Preserving these sites will allow for a more complete understanding of seasonally wet sites as well as the landscape history of human occupation through deep time in south Florida.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37277.0