Nature
Unravelling The Mystery Of Calusa Kingdom
Johnson Denise
First Posted: May 03, 2016 10:26 AM EDT
History said that before modern countries like Dubai and China started to build their islands, native people from the southwestern started to build their own. The Calusa, the native people in the area, have piled shells into huge heaps to build their own water-bound towns.
The "Shell Indians" were the first shell collectors in history. Unlike other tribes, the Calusa's did not make a lot of pottery items. They mostly use shells for tools, jewelries and to decorate their houses and shrines. They also use shells for fishing and hunting.
One particular island called Mound Key was said to be the capital of the Calusa kingdom when Spanish explorers first set foot in the area. Now, a new interdisciplinary study led by an anthropologist from University of Georgia, Victor Thompson, dug up information on how the composition of Mound Key, located in Estero Bay beside Fort Myers Beach in Florida along the Gulf of Mexico, changed over the years in relation to both the environment and social shifts.
According to Thompson, the study will show how people adapted to the coastal waters of Florida, and that they were able to do it in a way that supported a large number of people. Thompson, an associate professor of anthropology in UGA's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the director of the Center for Archaeological Sciences also said that the Calusa were an incredibly complex group of people who fish, gather, and hunts and had the ability to engineer certain landscapes. "Basically, they were terraforming," Thompson added.
Science Daily reported that Mound Key was basically made from heaps of shells, bones and other discarded objects known as midden. Thompson and his colleagues did an intensive study on the island in 2013 and 2014, and used coring, test, and block excavation and radiocarbon dating to make sure that the mitten wasn't the same from the top to the bottom. Typically, the age of the materials found in midden shifts from more recent to older the farther down one digs. However, this was not the pattern Thompson and his colleagues found at Mound Key in their cores and excavations.
If you look at the island, there's symmetry to it, with the tallest mounds being almost 10 meters high (or 32 feet) above modern sea level," Thompson said. He added saying, "You're talking hundreds of millions of shells. ... Once they've amassed a significant amount of deposits, then they rework them. They reshape them," Science Newsline reported.
Thompson guessed that the island was occupied early in its existence and midden accumulated as simply the result of daily subsistence. However, during the time when temperatures changed, the sea levels lowered and the number of fish declined, the Calusa left the island and only came back when the climate and fishing became productive again.
Its second occupation is associated with large-scale labor projects that ultimately gave the island its final shape. All this work appears to have been supported largely by fishing--and possibly the storage of the live surpluses of those aquatic harvests. The Calusa were powerful--they controlled most of south Florida when the Spanish arrived on Mound Key in the 16th century. These fisher kings confused the European explorers because they weren't farmers; they typically had only small garden plots, and, on top of that, their capital town was built on an artificial island.
"They had a fundamentally different outlook on life because they were fisher folk rather than agriculturalists, which ultimately was one of the great tensions between them and the Spanish," Thompson said.
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First Posted: May 03, 2016 10:26 AM EDT
History said that before modern countries like Dubai and China started to build their islands, native people from the southwestern started to build their own. The Calusa, the native people in the area, have piled shells into huge heaps to build their own water-bound towns.
The "Shell Indians" were the first shell collectors in history. Unlike other tribes, the Calusa's did not make a lot of pottery items. They mostly use shells for tools, jewelries and to decorate their houses and shrines. They also use shells for fishing and hunting.
One particular island called Mound Key was said to be the capital of the Calusa kingdom when Spanish explorers first set foot in the area. Now, a new interdisciplinary study led by an anthropologist from University of Georgia, Victor Thompson, dug up information on how the composition of Mound Key, located in Estero Bay beside Fort Myers Beach in Florida along the Gulf of Mexico, changed over the years in relation to both the environment and social shifts.
According to Thompson, the study will show how people adapted to the coastal waters of Florida, and that they were able to do it in a way that supported a large number of people. Thompson, an associate professor of anthropology in UGA's Franklin College of Arts and Sciences and the director of the Center for Archaeological Sciences also said that the Calusa were an incredibly complex group of people who fish, gather, and hunts and had the ability to engineer certain landscapes. "Basically, they were terraforming," Thompson added.
Science Daily reported that Mound Key was basically made from heaps of shells, bones and other discarded objects known as midden. Thompson and his colleagues did an intensive study on the island in 2013 and 2014, and used coring, test, and block excavation and radiocarbon dating to make sure that the mitten wasn't the same from the top to the bottom. Typically, the age of the materials found in midden shifts from more recent to older the farther down one digs. However, this was not the pattern Thompson and his colleagues found at Mound Key in their cores and excavations.
If you look at the island, there's symmetry to it, with the tallest mounds being almost 10 meters high (or 32 feet) above modern sea level," Thompson said. He added saying, "You're talking hundreds of millions of shells. ... Once they've amassed a significant amount of deposits, then they rework them. They reshape them," Science Newsline reported.
Thompson guessed that the island was occupied early in its existence and midden accumulated as simply the result of daily subsistence. However, during the time when temperatures changed, the sea levels lowered and the number of fish declined, the Calusa left the island and only came back when the climate and fishing became productive again.
Its second occupation is associated with large-scale labor projects that ultimately gave the island its final shape. All this work appears to have been supported largely by fishing--and possibly the storage of the live surpluses of those aquatic harvests. The Calusa were powerful--they controlled most of south Florida when the Spanish arrived on Mound Key in the 16th century. These fisher kings confused the European explorers because they weren't farmers; they typically had only small garden plots, and, on top of that, their capital town was built on an artificial island.
"They had a fundamentally different outlook on life because they were fisher folk rather than agriculturalists, which ultimately was one of the great tensions between them and the Spanish," Thompson said.
See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone