Submerged inland landscapes of the Aucilla basin, Northwest Florida, USA: populating the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene landscape

ABSTRACT

Archaeological data have demonstrated that modern Florida was occupied by at least 14,550 years ago, but evidence of Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene peoples (ca. 14,600–8,000 cal B.P.) is limited to far inland and upland settings, as more than half of Florida’s peninsula was drowned between ca. 21,000–6,000 cal B.P. Rising aquifer levels of the Late Pleistocene allowed some interior sites to preserve within forming river channels, especially some springfed sinkholes that became the Aucilla River of northwest Florida. Terrestrial sites are poorly preserved in comparison, containing stone tools in mixed and/or undateable stratigraphy. Geospatial analysis of the 92 early sites in the Aucilla basin demonstrates that the underwater sites are crucial to provide a more robust understanding of early people, as the earliest sites are found only underwater, and the preponderance of the multicomponent sites also are inundated.

KEYWORDS:

• Landscape archaeology
• submerged landscapes
• Paleoindian archaeology
• geoarchaeology
• Pleistocene paleoenvironments

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my appreciation to Drs Conolly and Ward for organizing and shepherding this special issue. Thank you to Chip Birdsong at the Florida Master Site File for the GIS data and site files analyzed in this paper and to Therese Westman for assistance with data cleanup. I also want to express my enduring gratitude to all my predecessors and compatriots who have been working in the Aucilla Basin over the past several decades. Finally, I acknowledge the Native peoples, past and present, for whom the Aucilla Basin is an important part of their stories, and further acknowledge that I am privileged to work on Native landscapes with enduring histories.

Data availability statement

As site locations are protected data, the data used to generate the conclusions for this article are available from the author or from the Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research upon request.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While it has been common archaeological practice to use the terms ‘Paleoindian’ for Pleistocene archaeological cultures and ‘Early Archaic’ for Early Holocene cultures in the Americas, these terms are loaded for many Native descendants. Thus, to honor repeated requests from Indigenous consultants and collaborators, I refer strictly to millennia before present and established geological terminology in this paper. I use established diagnostic style names to aid in correlation with previous research.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jessi J. Halligan

Jessi J. Halligan earned a Ph.D. in Anthropology from Texas A&M University in 2012, conducting submerged landscape studies in the Aucilla River Basin in Florida and overseeing excavations and analyses at archaeological sites in Texas for the Center for the Study of the First Americans. She has more than 25 years of experience in American archaeology, working in academic and resource management settings on land and underwater. Jessi is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Florida State University.