Pre-Clovis to the Early Archaic: Human Presence, Expansion, and Settlement in Florida over Four Millennia

ABSTRACT

In this article, we review evidence for the initial presence, later expansion, and subsequent settling-in of first Floridians during times when climate change and sea level rise decreased the amount of habitable land. We present projectile-point and formal-tool sequences and estimated chronologies that describe Florida’s: (1) pre-Clovis presence (exploration); (2) Clovis presence focused on river channels, springs, chert resources, and possibly megafauna (colonization); (3) continuation and proliferation of Clovis-related, but post-megafauna late Paleoindian lanceolate point makers that remained focused on river channels, springs, and chert (expansion); (4) transition to side- and corner-notched points and a plethora of formal tools, along with significant population increase and landscape use occurring away from waterways (settlement); and (5) possible population decline or abandonment, or both, by 10,000 calendar years ago or soon thereafter.

KEYWORDS:

• Pre-Clovis
• Paleoindian
• Early Archaic
• sea level rise
• paleolandscape

Acknowledgements

This manuscript is an expanded version of our presentation “Learning the Lithic Landscape: Exploring the Effects of Dispersal, Migration, and Colonization on Lithic Technologies and vice versa,” presented at the 2017 ISKM conference in Buenos Aires. We would like to thank Ted Goebel for organizing this PaleoAmerica issue and including our paper. We are infinitely grateful to David Thulman for his research projects, critiques, and opinions. We also are grateful to Thulman and Ike Rainey for sharing their diagnostic artifact data; the projectile points were found by collectors before the cancelation of Florida’s isolated finds policy. Finally, we would like to thank David Anderson, Jim Dunbar, and David Thulman for constructive reviews, commentaries, and opinions concerning this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Michael Faught received his PhD in 1996 from the University of Arizona. He is best known for submerged pre-contact archaeology in Florida and the CRM industry. Dr. Faught has spent much time studying and publishing his North and South American Paleoindian and Early Archaic archaeological research.

Charlotte Pevny received her PhD in 2009 from Texas A&M University, where she worked at the Center for the Study of First Americans. She has studied Clovis debitage and conducted use-wear analysis of Clovis artifacts from the Gault site in Texas. Dr. Pevny is a Project Manager at SEARCH, Inc., and she has almost 30 years of experience in the CRM industry.

Notes

1 David Thulman (2006, 2012a) scanned and analyzed Paleoindian points from legally procured private collections. We use Thulman’s data for Clovis-Simpson-Suwanee ratios. Paleoindian and Early Archaic data also were culled from the Ike Rainey Collection, a spreadsheet database compiled by Monte Pharmer that includes legally procured artifacts. We used ratios of collector-found Paleoindian and Early Archaic projectile-point types as proxies for population structure in the late Pleistocene and early Holocene Florida.

2 See Webb et al. (1984) for a discussion of the context, recovery, and dating of the bison bones. Three skull fragments were dated to 9990 ± 200 ¹⁴C yr BP (10,092 cal yr BP (Beta-5941)) and a bison distal-humerus fragment was dated to 11,170 ± 130 ¹⁴C yr BP (13,063 cal yr BP (Beta-5942)).