Exploring the Orange Period in Southern Florida’s Inland Tree Islands

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Orange period (6000-3000 BP) communities in Florida have been defined by the manufacture of fiber-tempered ceramics within eastern Florida and have a well defined chronology. Orange period communities engaged physically with the landscape through shell and sand terraforming and community mobility. Contrastingly, the Archaic period in south Florida is not adequately defined in chronology nor material culture with the general consensus that fiber-tempered Orange pottery has not been well recorded near Lake Okeechobee. Most of the investigative work around tree islands in southern Florida, identifies Archaic sites as discrete and temporary camp locations, potentially obscuring inter-regional mobility and habitation of these communities. Recent wetland restoration conducted by the USDA-NRCS identified several freshwater hammock sites with fiber-tempered Orange ware ceramics within southeastern Highlands County. We have been able to identify and preserve a unique arrangement of Orange period sites within a large seasonally wet landscape not previously investigated archaeologically. Historic maps and aerial imagery, high definition LiDAR derived DEM maps, and 20th century landscape use records are used to explore and preserve a large and understudied archaeological landscape. This can help archaeologists to expand regional chronologies of under researched south-central Archaic Floridians.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40246.0