COLLECTIONS
The South Florida archaeological collections contain materials from thirteen counties (Broward, Charlotte, Collier, Dade, Glades, Hendry, Highlands, Lee, Martin, Monroe, Okeechobee, Palm Beach, and St. Lucie). This area includes 14,666 square miles, about 27% of the area of Florida. William Marquardt also curates the ethnographic collection of Seminole and Miccosukee material culture.
Search the image gallery featuring representative objects from all three South Florida collections
Archaeological Collections
Systematic Collections
Systematic artifact collections are most comprehensive for southwest Florida. There are also important reference collections from elsewhere in South Florida. Included are the so-called "Cushing Collection," comprised of the many items collected by Frank Hamilton Cushing during his early visits to the southwest Florida coast; the Van Beck Collection excavated from the Marco Midden in the 1960s, the extensive Fort Center artifacts, including carved wooden posts, ca. A.D. 400; artifacts collected by John Goggin, on which the major systematic artifact typologies for south Florida are based; and all artifacts, precolumbian and post-contact, that have been excavated during the Southwest Florida Project (e.g., Horr's Island, Cash Mound, Galt Island, Buck Key, Josslyn Island, Useppa Island, and the Pineland Site Complex). Archaeobotanical, zooarchaeological, and pedoarchaeological samples are curated in the Florida Museum's Environmental Archaeology collections.
The Pineland Collection
The Pineland collection is the largest systematic collection from a major Calusa town site. Materials excavated from the Pineland Site Complex between 1988 and 1995 comprise more than 140,000 items. The collection is made up of artifacts, environmental specimens, and associated records. Artifacts include Native American pottery sherds; tools and decorative objects made of shell, bone, shark teeth, and stone; Spanish-derived glass, metal, and ceramic objects; and waterlogged wood, seeds, and other organic materials. Oxygen-free waterlogged areas of the Pineland site preserved the only known prehistoric papaya seeds ever found in North America, as well as the only prehistoric chile pepper seeds known for the eastern United States. The seeds are un-charred, and are about 1900 years old.
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has awarded a three-year grant (2007-2009) to Bill Marquardt and Karen Walker to preserve and organize the Pineland collection. The grant is funding curation of materials that resulted from five major field seasons at Pineland (1988, 1989, 1990, 1992, and 1995) as well as 18 linear feet of associated records. Museum staff will rehabilitate the collection by rehousing artifacts, specimens, and samples using an archival bagging and boxing method that will maintain physical order by catalog number and provenience.
View the image gallery of representative objects from the Systematic Collection
The Key Marco Collection
Perhaps the best known collection from South Florida, this group of artifacts was excavated in 1896 from a muck site on Marco Island, Florida. Unusual conditions of preservation allowed recovery of netting, cordage, wooden boxes, wooden bowls, bone implements, several extraordinary carved and painted masks and figureheads, and a famous 6-inch-high carved wooden seated feline figurine. They are recognized world wide as remarkable specimens of Native American artistic achievement. The Key Marco materials are principally divided between the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania; the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; and the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida. The Florida Museum owns over 600 artifacts of cordage, bone, shell, and wood (including bowls, clubs, the "woodpecker" painted plaque, stools, and two masks). Our Key Marco holdings include numerous examples of fishing gear, such as nets, net weights, net-mesh gauges, bone points and pins, and shell tools and vessels. Artifacts from Key Marco are on exhibit in the Hall of South Florida People and Environments.
View the image gallery of representative objects from the Key Marco Collection
Ethnographic Collections
The Seminole and Miccosukee Collection
Artifacts of the Seminole and Miccosukee people include baskets, clothing, footwear, tools, cooking and food-processing implements, dolls, ball-game gear, musical instruments, and photographs. The majority of these items were collected systematically by John Goggin in the 1940s and 1950s, to be used as a research and teaching collection. Many of the other items have been donated by relatives of people who lived and worked among the Seminole and Miccosukee in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Items from this collection are on exhibit in the Hall of South Florida People and Environments
View the image gallery of representative objects from the Seminole and Miccosukee Collection