Geochemical Sourcing of Early Pottery from the Florida Keys

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Like many island sites with a rich archaeological record, the Florida Keys exist on the margins of mainstream research trajectories and have seen little systematic investigation. This paper presents the results of a geochemical pilot study of Ancestral/Pre-Columbian pottery from two large midden sites in the Keys. The Keys material is compared to similar pottery from a contemporary midden site in the Everglades and a clay source in the Upper Keys. Results suggest independent areas of hyperlocal pottery production despite ceramic styles that were shared broadly across the region. Based on these results and our ongoing analysis of materials from new excavations in the Florida Keys, we offer suggestions on how the ceramic data informs models of social and political interaction at the height of Calusa complexity. Finally we suggest future areas of research in order to better understand the social interactions of early south Florida peoples.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52273