William Marquardt

Florida Museum of Natural History · Natural History

This chapter highlights a century (1923-2023) of collaboration between the Florida Museum of Natural History and the Native American tribes of South Florida.

Il rappelle l'engagement des membres de la Physiophile, nos lointains predecesseurs qui furent a l'origine du renouveau de ces festivites; il dresse un tableau precis et documente de cette fete regionale et populaire du solstice d'ete entre 1975 et 1985; il montre comment une fete ancienne a ete in trumentalisee pour devenir une manifestation regi...

Trade before Civilization explores the role that long-distance exchange played in the establishment and/or maintenance of social complexity, and its role in the transformation of societies from egalitarian to non-egalitarian. Bringing together research by an international and methodologically diverse team of scholars, it analyses the relationship b...

At European contact, the Calusa of southwestern Florida were the most complex society in Florida. For staple sustenance they relied not on agriculture, but on aquatic resources harvested mainly from shallow inshore bays. We summarize recently discovered physical evidence on Mound Key of mound-building, monumental architecture, large-scale food proc...

In 1566, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés arrived at the capital of the Calusa kingdom. During that same year Menéndez issued the order to construct Fort San Antón de Carlos, which was occupied until 1569. This fort was also the location of one of the first Jesuit missions (1567) in what is now the United States. We now can confirm what archaeologists and...

Significance Fish were captured and stored by Native Americans of southwestern Florida in complex walled structures called watercourts, constructed of shell and other sediments. These structures were engineered with knowledge of tidal systems, hydrology, and the biology of species to be stored in these courts. This work documents the considerable a...

In 2013, the Padgett figurine, a pre-Columbian wooden statuette, was donated to the Florida Museum of Natural History. In this chapter, I describe the object and situate it among nine other known wooden statuettes from Florida. Finally, I discuss various interpretations of these objects and suggest avenues for further study.

In chapter 6, Karen Walker, William Marquardt, Lee Newsom, and Merald Clark explore the uneven distribution of wetsite deposits at the Pineland site complex in Southwest Florida. Walker and her colleagues propose a model that explains where wetsite deposits can be expected within the sprawling complex of mounds, middens, and canals. The Thomasson f...

Our work at Mound Key, the Capital of the Calusa Kingdom, identifies a large structure on top of Mound 1 that likely was associated with a powerful long-lived lineage. The rise to power for this group coincided with a significant amelioration of the shallow-water estuarine environment of Estero Bay during the Warm Medieval Period. We interpret this...

Book review of Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology

Artifacts made from sinistral (left-handed) whelk shells are commonly found at inland archaeological sites in eastern North America. Past attempts to source the coast of origin of these marine shells based on chemical analyses have provided tentative results. A knowledge of sinistral whelk natural history is essential before attempting shell sourci...

Evidential Reasoning in Archaeology. ROBERT CHAPMAN and ALISON WYLIE . 2016. Bloomsbury Academic, London and New York. ix + 254 pp. 30 B&W illustrations. $82.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4725-2527-7. - William H. Marquardt

Oyster reefs in Southwest Florida (USA) have been integral to estuarine ecology throughout the Holocene. Though Crassostrea virginica has never been commercially harvested, aboriginal people used the oyster substantially, accumulating middens between 5000 BC and AD 1700. A conservation paleobiological/ historical ecological study of oysters from mi...

We describe the lightning whelk (Busycon sinistrum) and show how its shells were used among coastal peoples along the Gulf of Mexico and lower Atlantic coast. During the Middle and Late Archaic periods, lightning whelk shells were transported hundreds of km from the coasts to the Midsouth where they were made into a variety of artifacts that were i...

Mound Key was once the capital of the Calusa Kingdom, a large Pre-Hispanic polity that controlled much of southern Florida. Mound Key, like other archaeological sites along the southwest Gulf Coast, is a large expanse of shell and other anthropogenic sediments. The challenges that these sites pose are largely due to the size and areal extent of the...

Corrected and modeled probability distributions for all AMS and conventional radiocarbon dates for Mound Key. Marine dates were calibrated using Marine13 with a Delta R of -5 +/-20 and all terrestrial dates were calibrated using IntCal13 curve [65] in a simple phase model in OxCal [66]. All provenience information is provided in the first column an...

We describe the lightning whelk (Busycon sinistrum) and show how its shells were used among coastal peoples along the Gulf of Mexico and lower Atlantic coast. During the Middle and Late Archaic periods, lightning whelk shells were transported hundreds of km from the coasts to the Midsouth where they were made into a variety of artifacts that were i...

In an article published in this journal in 1986, I critically reviewed models of the emergence of the Calusa social formation in southwest Florida. An interdisciplinary project that I hoped would provide detailed information with which to refine those models had just begun, so at the time there were few substantive results. In subsequent years, det...

In 2011, we initiated a geophysical survey of the Pineland Site Complex. The complex is comprised of two imposing residential midden-mound groups, two sand burial mounds and several linear (and other) middens along previous shorelines, and a canal system that not only integrated features within the site complex, but also served to connect it to the...

Focusing on the southeastern United States, I provide some alternative perspectives on shell mounds previously interpreted as architectural features, temple mounds, and feasting sites. The same pattern of deposition often inferred to indicate mound construction—darker-colored, highly organic strata alternating with lighter-colored, shell-rich strat...

The Late Archaic of the American Southeast is typically described as a time of population growth, innovative developments in subsistence strategies, and increased social complexity. Although it is difficult to generalize, many Early Woodland communities are characterized as relatively small scale, fairly mobile foragers organized into unranked or m...

Societies form and are formed by their natural and constructed environments. People make their territories, houses, living spaces, and work spaces their own by consciously modifying them in terms of their effects on the senses, their utility, and their economic value. For houses and other buildings, such efforts are invariably conditioned both cons...

Neuman, Robert W. An Introduction to Louisiana Archaeology. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1984. xvi + 366 pp. including plates, references, and index. $27.50 cloth.

This chapter discusses complexity and scale in the study of fisher–gatherer–hunters (FGH). Advances in the understanding of FGH complexity can be traced in part to improvements in dating, recovery of paleoecological information, and macrolevel spatial analysis. This research has taken place almost entirely under the controlling model of cultured ev...

Professional archaeologists in America seem to have reached a consensus that systematic archaeological collections are vital to current and future comparative research. Current repositories are inadequately designed and insufficiently funded. Minimally, a repository must be housed in a safe, sturdy, secure building equipped to handle curation and c...

Seriation, a unidimensional ordering technique, is one of archaeology’s oldest and most useful tools. Its mathematical aspects have drawn the attention of mathematicians and statisticians in recent years, even as archaeologists themselves have begun to question its underlying assumptions. In this paper I describe some techniques appropriate at each...

Seriation is a mathematically entertaining and useful procedure, the epistemological status of which has been insufficiently explored by archaeologists. This chapter presents the concept of seriation. It explains the way seriation works, and discusses the advances in seriation techniques, theory, and epistemology. It also describes seriation in con...

Thesis--Washington University. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 271-282). Photocopy of typescript.

The crests of beach ridges deposited on Sanibel and La Costa Islands during the 2,000--1,500 BP interval are elevated 90 to 150 cm above the crests of historic beach ridges formed over the past 100 years. These elevated swash zone deposits record a sea-level position of perhaps +1 meter MSL. The stratigraphy of the Solana Site estuarine midden at t...

Thesis--Washington University. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 271-282). Microfilm of typescript.