Faculty researchers and archaeology students conducting a recent archaeological survey on the University of West Florida's Pensacola campus have discovered artifacts tied to multiple pre-Columbian Native American cultures.
The survey is required as part of the university's preparation for infrastructure improvements related to the construction of a new football stadium.
"Any ground-disturbing projects on state-owned land need to be reviewed by both the Environmental Protection (Agency) office as well as the Division of Historical Resources," said Ramey Gougeon, director of the UWF Archaeology Institute. "When DHR did their review of the infrastructure development related to the new football stadium, they determined that we needed to do an archaeological survey before that construction started."
After receiving a research permit from the state and starting the survey at the beginning of March, Gougeon said his team found that a part of the stadium development is sitting on a known (prehistoric) archaeological site that was first documented in 1989.
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"It's a relatively small site. It was probably a seasonal camp site that was used multiple times in the pre-contact era," Gougeon stated. "We suspect the first visits were probably between 600 and 900 A.D and there was a second series of visits sometime between maybe 1250 and 1600 A.D."
The oldest artifacts are tied to the Weeden Island culture of the Woodland period, a prehistoric Gulf Coast network of communities from about A.D. 200 to 900. (Although spelled differently, the name comes from a burial site at Weedon Island Preserve in Pinellas County.) The later ceramics reflect the more advanced, mound-building Mississippian period.
Based on the ongoing research, Gougeon says he believes people came to the site seasonally to take advantage of food resources like hickory nuts and acorns, as well as fishing and hunting.
"Primarily, we've been finding ceramic sherds, related to domestic cookware and serving ware," he said. We're not finding huge amounts of sherds, but the size and condition of those materials, as well as kind of the relatively intact nature of the site, itself, tells us that this site has the potential to tell us a great deal about those pre-historic periods."
Gougeon added there's a likelihood that the camp was used by groups of people who had ties across the entirety of the Gulf coast.
"The styles of pottery that they're making are the same that we find for hundreds of miles in every direction," Gougeon said. "And, it speaks to connected groups of people who probably spoke similar languages. They had vast trading networks. They had a lot of ties with other communities. A small site like this may reflect the activities of one or two families for brief periods of time, but the artifacts they left behind can tell us about those broader social connections that they had."
One of the great things about the site is how "intact" it is, according to Jennifer Melcher, senior faculty research associate with the UWF Archaeology Institute.
"That is incredibly valuable to us to understand more about Native American history here in the Panhandle. We get so few sites, which have been preserved and not overlogged or plowed, or anything like that," Melcher said. "And, the testing that we're doing is showing that this has generally not been disturbed since people left the site over 1,000 years ago in some cases, so that's really incredible."
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Additionally, the project is providing easy access to valuable "hands-on" learning opportunities for students studying anthropology and archaeology at UWF.
"I think it's been a really great experience for our students to get out and get some, what we call, phase one archaeology under their belts, because normally these are the kinds of projects you have to travel for; you have to go somewhere and do shovel testing in the middle of a cornfield in Mississippi or something like that," she said. "In this case, they can pop out of bed, come here, shovel test for a little bit, go to class, maybe come back and join us again, maybe not. So, they get that high-impact experience right here on campus."
Additional archaeological survey projects on campus are anticipated to continue throughout the spring, with survey work on the pre-Columbian site to wrap up this month. Then decisions will have to be made about whether to continue to try to develop the site or if the stadium infrastructure can be relocated to another part of campus, which could trigger more survey work.
"If they want to continue to develop this site, what we will probably look at next is more intensive investigations to collect as much data as we can before the infrastructure project goes in," said Gougeon.
University officials say the investigation of this archaeological site is not expected to have a negative impact on stadium infrastructure plans.
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