A Prehistoric Cemetery In the Gulf of Mexico An unexpected discovery by a fossil hunter diving a quarter-mile off Manasota Key near Venice, Florida, has led to a groundbreaking archaeological project that could change everything scientists thought they knew about offshore archaeology. Investigations by the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research at the Manasota Key Offshore…
Sophia Sciandra receives her prize check from Rebecca O’Sullivan. In honor of the memory of longtime Central Gulf Coast Archaeological Society (CGCAS) member Mac Perry’s dedication to bringing archaeological knowledge to the public, this month’s archaeology lecture featured the winner of the Mac Perry Student Paper Competition. Just as Mac did with his book Indian…
History Washing Away: The Archaeological Past and Future of Egmont Key Egmont Key spent most of its existence as an unremarkable, uninhabited sand island at the mouth of Tampa Bay, visited by the indigenous inhabitants of Florida only occasionally as a temporary fishing stop. But over the course of the last 170 years, this small…
The Rocky Road from Tampa to Chicasa: Hernando de Soto’s Tribulations in the Interior Southeast The beginnings of the journey of the members of the Hernando de Soto expedition were fairly auspicious. They encountered sizable and prosperous chiefdoms ranging from Florida through Georgia and the Carolinas, and by virtue of size and military technology were…
“The first written description of what may be tattooing in the Americas was reported by Columbus’s crew members on his first voyages to the New World. Dr. Diego Alverez Chanca, a physician on Columbus’s second voyage, noted in a letter, that the Caribbean Indians painted themselves with sharpened reeds. Oviedo, the first historian of Spanish Florida who wrote in…
Archaeological investigation at the Perico Island North Midden (8MA6A) in 2016 and 2017 uncovered new data on this complex and intriguing site resulting in a reinterpretation of its role in Terminal Archaic/Transitional and Early Woodland developments on the Gulf coast. Excavation below the water table revealed thousands of postmolds and pit features (some of massive…
Today, more than half of the earth’s 7 billion people live in cities, and we take the benefits—and challenges—of urban life as a given. But the vast majority of human history was lived in communities of much smaller size. For social and biological scientists, the decision our ancestors made to begin living in larger communities…
