Florida Museum of Natural History

South Florida Archaeology and Ethnography

RESEARCH

People and the Environment

Pine Island Sound - click to enlarge

Estuary scene, Pine Island Sound.

Some scholars believe that rich inshore food resources were sufficient to fulfill the role usually played by agriculture. Important to this productivity are the mangrove forests and seagrass meadows found near the coast, providing the energy base for a complex food web as well as nutrition and safe havens for small fishes. Apparently, the Calusa and their neighbors understood this productive environment well enough to prosper for centuries, and became socially complex and politically powerful without recourse to plant and animal husbandry.

Both environmental conditions and specific historical processes can lead to higher or lower levels of social complexity. In typical chiefdoms, centralizing and decentralizing tendencies exist in opposition. Moreover, chiefdoms do not exist in isolation but are related to broader-scale ideological, exchange, and political systems that are themselves dynamic and influenced by environmental and historical processes. When populations expand, either from internal population increases or by means of conquest or encapsulation, food production must increase.

Calusa canoes and canals

Artist's conception of Calusa canoes and canals.

One of the ways in which the Calusa may have been able to intensify their food production was by means of large-scale fish weirs, traps, and holding pens. Linear keys still visible today in Bull Bay and Estero Bay (located in the greater Charlotte Harbor estuarine system that was the heartland of the Calusa) cannot be explained by modern dredging, and may be the remnants of elaborate large-scale fishing facilities. South Florida natives had several different kinds of watercraft, including seagoing vessels, small cargo canoes, and barges made of platforms connecting two parallel canoes. The Calusa and other south Florida Indians are known to have engineered substantial canals, both within their island settlements (e.g., Josslyn Island, Big Mound Key, Mound Key, Pineland, Naples, and the Lake Okeechobee area) and between their larger towns and interior waterways. The paths of these canals are clearly visible on aerial photographs of the area taken prior to modern development, and are described in detail by explorers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1896, when Frank Cushing visited the Pineland Site Complex, then known as Battey's Landing, the canal was still 30 feet wide and 6 feet deep.

The Calusa were characterized by most or all of the conditions known to foster the emergence of ranked societies, and probably functioned intermittently as a weak tribute-based state during the post-contact period. However, the extreme complexity and instability reported by the Spaniards was probably conditioned by internal conflicts and stimulated by their reactions to European commerce and militarism (see Post-contact Transformations).

 

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