Zooarchaeological Investigations of Florida Gulf Coast Civic-Ceremonial Centers

Summary

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

Zooarchaeological research of Woodland period Florida Gulf Coast civic-ceremonial centers indicate that human-animal interactions, implicated through harvest and subsistence patterns, were linked to and affected by local environmental perturbations. Regional scale changes in site settlement and subsistence patterns at these coastal centers have been noted to co-occur with the advent of the Vandal Minimum (~600 CE), a climatic event that may have driven alterations in resource availability and local environmental conditions. The Spring Warrior Complex (8TA154) is a Middle to Late Woodland (200-1000 CE) civic-ceremonial center on the Northwest Gulf Coast of Florida, and is the case study through which the articulation between animal harvest, subsistence economy, local environment, and global climate is explored. By analyzing the faunal assemblage of Spring Warrior, the research presented here characterizes the site’s faunal diversity and abundance, and delineates key taxa indicative of local environmental conditions, in order to track changes in patterns through space and time. In conjunction with radiocarbon dating, this research contextualizes human activity at the site, establishes a chronology for animal harvest and subsistence patterns, and compares these trends with contemporaneous coastal centers, ultimately to place Spring Warrior within this larger Woodland regional narrative of climate change.

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): 53215