“Let Us All Enjoy the Fish”: Alternative Pathways and Contingent Histories of Collective Action and Governance Among Maritime Societies of the Western Peninsular Coast of Florida, USA, 100–1600 CE

Abstract

Ethnographers have ably documented the great extent and diversity of social institutions that contemporary fishers and shellfishers employ to collectively manage common property resources. However, the collective action regimes developed among ancient maritime societies remain understudied by archaeologists. We summarize research into the development and form of collective action among the maritime societies of the western peninsular coast of Florida, USA, drawing on our own recent work in the Tampa Bay area and previous work elsewhere in the region, especially the Calusa area to the south. Archaeological evidence suggests that collective action became more important in Tampa Bay in the first centuries CE, probably owing to a marine transgression that resulted in more productive estuaries. Groups here staked claims to productive estuarine locations through the founding of villages, the building of mounds, and the construction of relatively simple marine enclosures. Historically, these changes resulted in societies of relatively small scale and limited authoritarian government. In contrast, collective action developed later in the Calusa area, may have begun in relation to resource scarcity than plenty, and may been founded in kinship rather than in public ritual. Collective action in the Calusa area resulted in projects of greater scale and complexity, providing a foundation for more hierarchical and authoritarian social formations.

Geoarchaeology and Coastal Morphodynamics of Harbor Key (8MA15): Indigenous Persistence at a Partially Inundated Native Shell Mound Complex in Tampa Bay, Florida

“…Within Tampa Bay, shell mound sites are commonly situated at prominent points near the mouths of major tidal bayous; in many cases they armor or comprise the seaward-most supratidal landforms that protect inshore sub-basins from relatively energetic open bay waves. As noted by Pluckhahn and colleagues (2022a), this pattern appears exaggerated on the bay's southeastern shoreline.…”

“…Despite the apparent ecological suitability of the seascape for continued intensive settlement, as observed at civic-ceremonial centers along the Northern Gulf Coast, archaeological evidence suggests the decline of depositional activities—habitation, mound building, and the like—at Harbor Key after around AD 600, as well as apparently scrupulous avoidance by descendant Safety Harbor period peoples. However, there is compelling and unambiguous ethnohistoric evidence from the sixteenth century that Native peoples in Lower Tampa Bay used large artificial estuarine enclosures—much like the artificially enclosed Harbor Key / Bishop Harbor sub-basin—to facilitate the mass capture of fishes and other fauna (see Pluckhahn et al 2022a), suggesting that ancestral terraformed sites like Harbor Key continue to function as durable coastal infrastructures.…”

Stratigraphic Framework, Paleoenvironments, and Indigenous Terraforming of Inshore Estuarine Subbasins in Tampa Bay, Florida, U.S.A.

“…1000 calibrated (cal) years before present (YBP) the peninsula's western coastline was dotted with shell-bearing sites, some measuring more than 0.5 km 2 in area and raised more than 10 m above surrounding terrains (Austin, Mitchem, and Weisman, 2014;Pluckhahn, Jackson, and Rogers, 2021;Sassaman et al, 2017;Schwadron, 2017;Thompson et al, 2018). In Tampa Bay, as elsewhere along Florida's Gulf and Atlantic coasts, shell-terraformed Native settlements are situated conspicuously on the seascape, commonly on prominent points or along major tidal creeks, and sometimes forming islands or peninsulas that partially enclose tidal bayous (Pluckhahn, Jackson, and Rogers, 2022).…”