Tuesday, March 10, 2026 6:30 PM EST
Attend IN-PERSON (North Port Library, 13800 Tamiami Trail, North Port, FL 34287) or join us via ZOOM (Meeting ID: 818 8487 5930 Passcode: 472140)
ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE APALACHICOLA-LOWER CHATTAHOOCHEE VALLEY
Dr. Nancy Marie White
After decades of jungle survey and test excavation, new archaeological synthesis in this neglected region (in northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, southwest Georgia) provides better models of cultural adaptations over the last 14,000+ years. A revised settlement pattern shows Paleo-Indian evidence is densest in the tributary spring-fed Chipola River but also extends to the modern coast. As post-Ice Age sea-level rise pushed the river eastward, Archaic peoples adapted to climate change, developed the earliest ceramics about 4500 years ago, and deposited estuarine and riverine shell middens. By Middle Woodland times (ca. A.D. 300 to 700) mound ceremonialism included a fascination with light, exotic forms, and fancy imports but not yet any apparent economic stratification.
All this waned as people began growing maize inland, with Fort Walton-period agricultural chiefdoms emerging by A.D. 1000. Ceremonial centers included flat-topped temple mounds and farm villages, but coastal folks apparently had no agriculture, just a lot of seafood. Old-World invaders arrived 500 years later, then Spanish colonists, leading to major depopulation, disappearance of aboriginal material culture, and a confused protohistoric record. Creek groups moved south into Spanish Florida, becoming Seminoles. Settlements, including the largest Maroon community in the U.S., were destroyed by the emerging American nation. Recent historical archaeology research includes the short-lived antebellum boomtown of old St. Joseph (1836-1844); lost Civil War forts; recent historic sites; and the destroyed cultural landscape after Hurricane Michael in 2018.
Nancy White is from Cleveland, Ohio (home of rock-and-roll!) and earned graduate degrees from Case Western Reserve University. She is a professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida, Tampa, where she studies and teaches many courses including archaeological method, theory, public archaeology and cultural resources management, and gender in cross-cultural perspective. She has done field research throughout the eastern and western U.S., southwest France, Mexico, and Borneo (East Malaysia). Her books include Archaeology for Dummies, Gulf Coast Archaeology, and Grit-Tempered: Early Women Archaeologists in the Southeastern U.S. (co-edited with Lynne Sullivan and Rochelle Marrinan), just re-published in a 25-year Anniversary Edition. Her newest books are 2 volumes of Apalachicola Valey Archaeology (University of Alabama Press).