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Curator

The curator responsible for the Environmental Archaeology Program is Kitty F. Emery, an environmental archaeologist who specializes in ancient Mesoamerican peoples and environments. Emery's research emphasizes the importance of linking archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and geoarchaeological data to reconstruct ancient human/environment relationships.

At the Guatemalan site of Motul de San Jose, for example, she combines analyses of animal and plant remains from archaeological middens, with chemical analyses of soils and archaeological occupation surfaces to reconstruct a complete picture of how the ancient Maya acquired, used, and discarded the natural resources from the rainforests of the Mesoamerican tropics. A recent publication about the environmental archaeology work at this site can be found in the journal Mayab and is entitled "The Economics of Natural Resource Use at Ancient Motul de San Jose, Guatemala" (2004).

Emery's technical speciality is zooarchaeology, and her extensive research with animal remains from many Central American sites is allowing her to combine detailed zooarchaeological data with information from iconographic images, ethnohistoric texts, and modern legends and knowledge to create a digital database of information about the ancient Maya and the animals of their world. Her zooarchaeological publications are listed under Environmental Archaeology Staff Publications.

Curator Emeritus

Elizabeth S. Wing continues to be active in the Environmental Archaeology Program. She initiated a program of zooarchaeology in 1961 and over the years guided the division through its evolution to the Environmental Archaeology program.

Wing continues her research on the human uses of animals in the southeastern North America, the origins and spread of domestic animals in the Andes, and the overexploitation of animals as well as management of captive and domestic animals in the Caribbean. This research requires the collection of specimens of modern animals to use as a reference for identification of the fragmentary remains excavated from the archaeological sites. One of her recent papers deals specifically with ancient overfishing, a parallel to modern problems in the world's oceans: Wing, Stephen. R. and Elizabeth S. Wing 2001 Prehistoric fisheries in the Caribbean. Coral Reefs 20:1-8.

Collections Manager

The management of the Environmental Archaeology collections is the responsibility of two collection managers who oversee the use of the collection by visitors, students, and museum employees. They assist in the establishment of protocols for the care of both the modern comparative specimens and the zooarchaeological, archaeobotanical, and anthropogenic soils collections. This includes a computer database which is developed and includes all of the comparative animal collection and about two thirds of the zooarchaeological data. The computer databases for the botanical and soils collections are being developed. Sylvia Scudder, who has been a collection manager for over 20 years, is also a soils scientist. She has developed the field of archaeopedology (anthropogenic soils) in this program.

Studies of archaeopedology are new and promise to provide important information about the geographic extent of archaeological deposits, conditions favorable for preservation of organic remains, and past environmental conditions and landscape changes. The research involves chemical analysis of phosphates, calcium, and other soil constituents, and soil particle characteristics such as grain size and conditions. A paper describing the contributions these studies make to a better understanding of the past is: Scudder, Sylvia, John E. Foss, and Mary E. Collins. 1996. Soil Science and Archaeology, written by Sylvia Scudder, John E. Foss, and Mary E. Collins and published in 1996 in the journal Advances in Agronomy (57:1-75). See C.V.

Collection Manager

Zooarchaeologist Irv Quitmyer, collection manager since 2001, works on the animal remains from sites in southeastern North America and the circum-Caribbean region. His research specialty is the study of season of and age at death of animals incorporated into archaeological samples. Many but not all of these studies are based on incremental growth structures of mollusks, particularly bivalves such as the hard clam or quahog. These studies identify the season of death of organisms and therefore also the time of the year they were gathered or fished. They also illustrate the stress on animal populations from human exploitation. A description of some of this work is found in: Irvy R. Quitmyer, Douglas S. Jones and William S. Arnold. 1997. The sclerochronology of hard clams, Mercenaria spp., in southeastern U. S. A.: a method of elucidating the zooarchaeological records of seasonal resource procurement and seasonality in prehistoric shell middens, by Irvy R. Quitmyer, Douglas S. Jones and William S. Arnold, published in 1997 in the Journal of Archaeological Science 24 (9):825-840.

Volunteer Collection Manager

Another pivotal staff member in the Environmental Archaeology Program is the archaeobotanist, Donna Ruhl, who oversees the management of the EAP archaeobotanical collections on a volunteer basis while also conducting a variety of research projects. Her specialty is the study of macrobotanical remains such as seeds and wood excavated from archaeological sites primarily in southeastern North America. She has worked extensively on plant materials collected from Spanish colonial sites across La Florida.

Her research has generated data on sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century Spanish and Native American contexts to glean information about colonial landscape changes and transculturation primarily via plant introductions, exchanges, foodways, and economic strategies. One example of this work has been published in an article on the role of wheat and oranges in Spanish Florida for Historical Archaeology 30 (1):36-45). Another research focus is understanding Florida's prehistoric peoples' plant husbandry practices and how these impacted or were impacted by paleoclimatic changes.

Assistant Scientist

Karen Jo Walker is a faculty assistant scientist working part of the time in the Environmental Archaeology Program and part of the time with the FLMNH's South Florida Archaeology Program and the Randell Research Center.

She has worked extensively on the archaeology and the zooarchaeology of shell midden sites in coastal southwest Florida. She has examined the animal remains, both vertebrates and invertebrates, from many closely dated contexts from a series of prehistoric sites dating from A.D. 0-1700. With these data, combined with geoarchaeological and archaeobotanical information, she is charting storm events, inlet dynamics, sea-level, and climate changes. The basis for this work is described in her paper entitled "The zooarchaeology of Charlotte Harbor's Prehistoric Maritime Adaptation", published in 1992 in the book Culture and Environment in the Domain of the Calusa edited by William Marquardt. A related paper with Frank Stapor and William Marquardt in 1995 is entitled "Archaeological evidence for a 1750-1450 BP higher-than-present sea level along Florida's Gulf coast". Journal of Coastal Research Special Issue No. 17: 205-218.

Affiliated Researchers

Susan deFrance is an assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of Florida. She is continuing work she began as a graduate student specializing in zooarchaeology in the Environmental Archaeology Program. This work involves extensive research on faunal samples from sites excavated on various West Indian islands, including her Masters paper on the animal remains excavated from an early ceramic age site on the north coast of Puerto Rico. Subsequently she did a study of the animal remains associated with Spanish wineries situated along the Moquegua Valley in Peru. She is continuing her research on early coastal Peruvian sites. She contributed along with several other authors to a 1998 paper entitled Early maritime economy and El Niño events at Quebrada Tacahuay, Peru, published in the journal Science (Volume 281, pages 1833-1835).

Another such scholar and affiliate curator is Elizabeth Reitz, who until 2002 was the director of the Georgia Museum of Natural History and now is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Georgia. She uses comparative specimens appropriate for the study of Caribbean and Peruvian faunal samples, and her samples are from pre-contact through Colonial sites. The book written by Reitz and Curator Emeritus Wing, is one of the primary zooarchaeological texts available today: (1999) Zooarchaeology. Cambridge Manuals in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, New York.

The collections and assistance in research are available for scholars both in and outside of the University of Florida. Consequently, a number of undergraduate and graduate students work on individual projects using the collections. Some of these studies are the basis of honors theses, Masters theses, and Ph.D. dissertations. A class in zooarchaeology is taught every other year through the Anthropology Department at the University of Florida. The class acquaints students with research procedures involved in zooarchaeology and gives them an opportunity to analyze a faunal sample from an archaeological site. This provides the student with an appreciation of this type of research and a basic knowledge of zooarchaeology for those who want to continue work in Environmental Archaeology.