William H. Marquardt is Curator in Archaeology, Florida Museum of Natural History and Director of the University of Florida Institute of Archaeology and Paleoenvironmental Studies. He received the Ph.D. from Washington University, St. Louis in 1974. He has done archaeological research in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Kentucky, Missouri, New Mexico, and Burgundy (France). At the Florida Museum, he curates the South Florida archaeological and ethnographic collections. Since 1983, he has directed the Southwest Florida Project, focused on the ancient domain of the Calusa Indians (present-day Charlotte, Lee, and Collier counties). He is curator of the permanent exhibit People of the Estuary: Six Thousand Years in South Florida in the Florida Museum's Hall of South Florida People and Environments. He is also Director of the Randell Research Center, a research and education facility located in Pineland, Lee County, Florida.

Karen J. Walker is an environmental archaeologist who received her Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 1992. She serves as a faculty scientist and as collections manager for South Florida Archaeology & Ethnography at the Florida Museum of Natural History. She undertook the defining zooarchaeological studies of the Charlotte Harbor Estuarine System, and has published several articles on southwest Florida covering such diverse topics as ancient fishing technology, sea-level fluctuations, Calusa diet, the archaeology of twentieth-century logging camps, and the nineteenth and twentieth-century archaeology of Useppa Island. She was field director at the Pineland Site Complex during the 1990 and 1992 "Year of the Indian" excavations, and she wrote the Multiple Property National Register nomination for the ancient Calusa sites of Lee County. She serves as Chair of the Randell Research Center's Research and Collections Committee.

John E. Worth is Coordinator of Research Programs and Services at the Florida Museum's Randell Research Center at Pineland, Lee County, Florida. He is both an archaeologist and an ethnohistorian, having received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Florida in 1992. He has extensive archaeological experience in Florida and Georgia and has published translations of sixteenth-century eyewitness accounts concerning the Indian people of southwest Florida. His two books on Florida's Timucua Indians, published by the University Press of Florida, have been widely acclaimed. He has more than ten years' experience in public archaeology at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History (Atlanta), the Coosawattee Foundation in northern Georgia, and the Randell Research Center at Pineland.