A Geochemical and Petrographic Analysis of Ceramics from the Estero Island Site in SW Florida

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Estero Island site (8LL4) is located on a shell ridge in what is now Fort Myers Beach in southwestern Florida. A portion of the site, Mound House, consists of a historic house built on top of a Calusa shell mound which was occupied from ca. AD 500–1000. Conservation efforts at Mound House to preserve exposed Calusa archaeological deposits led to the excavation of five 1 × 1 units previously used as educational exhibits. This presentation reports an exploratory analysis of ceramics from one of the five units at Mound House to establish geochemical (LA-ICP-MS) and petrographic composition. Previous work at the site has discussed the importance of future work to help link the local communities at Estero to the broader Calusa kingdom and other indigenous cultures of southwest Florida. This analysis provides ceramic compositional signatures that can be used to compare to local and regional potting communities of practice and infer interaction through the movement of people, clays and/or ceramics. The project also adds significantly to the limited corpus of pottery compositional data in the south Florida region.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 41477.0