Four Discoveries: Environmental Archaeology in Southwest Florida (original) (raw)

For the past ten years, I have investigated the archaeology and environment of southwest Florida. My work has been enhanced by a team of colleagues and students without whom I would have learned considerably less. As will become obvious to the reader, teamwork enhances environmental archaeology. Like all archaeology, environmental archaeology is a discovery process in which one often finds what one looks for, but only what one looks for. That is, the questions we ask lead to the development of methods appropriate to our questions, and the methods frequently determine the knowledge we gain. For example, archaeobotanists and zooarchaeologists nowadays routinely apply fine-screen recovery methods. This technique leads to fundamentally different interpretations of the diet and environment than were obtained by previous investigators who used coarser-mesh screens. In this chapter, I hope to convince the reader of the vitality and relevance of interdisciplinary environmental archaeology. I will not attempt to do this by showing how new, improved methods are better than had old methods. Instead, I will discuss four new discoveries resulting from the application of a critical interdisciplinary approach. In doing so, I hope to emphasize that new research questions have effects on the generation of new knowledge equal to or greater than those of new methods and techniques.