EVERGLADES ARCHAEOLOGY
Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU) Assistant Professor, William Locascio, will be the speaker at our February 11 meeting. His topic will cover recent excavations by his FGCU students in the Everglades Agricultural Area. He has shown that the Everglades was inhabited for thousands of years in the Archaic Period and was not a sterile, uninhabited area as many have postulated. His work there is changing how we view the prehistoric populations and their subsistence base. He views his research as a way to teach the next generation of archaeologists and advance archaeological knowledge of this region, which reveals remains of life among the people that settled the region over three thousand years ago.
William Locascio received his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2010 and was an assistant professor at Flagler College from 2011–2014. He is currently an assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on pre-Columbian societies of Panama and addressed how and why societies became hierarchical after millennia of successful organization as egalitarian and semi-egalitarian groups. Over the last twenty years, he has been very fortunate to do archaeology in many regions of the Americas, from Alaska to Ecuador. “I came to Florida several years ago and have fallen in love with the archaeology and the archaeology community.”