Safety Harbor at the Weeden Island Site: Late Pre-Columbian Craft, Community, and Complexity on Florida's Gulf Coast

Abstract

This research explores how daily practices shape community organization and contribute to regional historical trajectories. I focus on a case study of the pre-Columbian Safety Harbor occupation (ca. AD 1000-1500) of the Weeden Island site, on the west central Gulf coast of Florida. Safety Harbor residents of Weeden Island occupied a coastal locale with access to estuarine resources, in a region neighboring powerful and increasingly complex groups, and within a settlement system and political environment that may have begun to adopt new ideologies and organizing principles. This project was designed to investigate a central research topic: During the Safety Harbor period, a time of regional changes in the settlement system and intensified interactions with powerful neighbors, what local opportunities to collaborate, coordinate labor, or compete for resources or authority emerged from the daily domestic practices at Weeden Island?

This case study is situated relative to two broad theoretical realms: the archaeological study of communities and ordinary domestic life, and anthropological approaches to long-term social change, including the development of complexity and inequality in hunter-gatherer societies. In addressing these bodies of literature, I aim to distinguish the local exercise of authority from power and influence at multi-community scales, and to emphasize the place of the local community in investigating broader historical trajectories.

The dissertation project focuses on original research at the Weeden Island site. This research included geophysical survey and excavations and the study of resulting materials, including stylistic and formal analysis of artifacts (primarily pottery; shell, bone, and stone tools; and shell and bone ornaments and associated debitage), zooarchaeological identification and analysis, macrobotanical identification, and radiocarbon dates. I argue that while there were abundant opportunities for the local coordination of community labor in subsistence activities, the crafting of tradeable shell ornaments was a likely domain for differentiation at an intrasite level and potentially between residents of the residential community as well. This study also has methodological implications for the combined use of magnetic susceptibility and magnetometer in forested shell-bearing sites.

This study highlights that craft production and trade were likely venues for social change in Safety Harbor residential and regional communities. At the local scale, coastal Safety Harbor communities focused on the production of shell beads, and this may also have been an area of experimentation with new divisions of labor, or the development of new ideological or ceremonial concepts. By transitioning from peripheral participants in Weeden Island era ceremonial culture to purveyors of raw and crafted shell goods, Safety Harbor people created a new role for themselves on the regional landscape, with implications for local historical trajectories.