It is arguably cliché by this point to comment on the cultural and geographical uniqueness of the Florida peninsula, owing to the steady flow of memes ranging from hanging chads and giant alligators strolling across golf courses to “Florida Man” stories. Many archaeologists are at least generally aware that Florida's seeming uniqueness is not an exclusively modern phenomenon. Few who have not worked in the region, however, are likely to be fully appreciative of its distinctive Native history and material culture, apart from the most famous wetland sites such as Key Marco and Windover Pond. For the uninitiated, the contributions to this edited volume will serve as useful introduction to Florida's fantastic wetsites and their artifacts. For those already in the know, it will serve as a useful compendium of work on both famous and lesser-known sites and artifacts by a mix of established and emerging scholars.
Lee Newsom and Vernon Knight, discussants on the SAA session that precipitated the volume, provide a useful foreword that details the history of Florida's wetsite archaeology and situates the corpus of well-preserved wooden artifacts with regard to broader studies of style and iconography in the American South. Editors Ryan Wheeler and Joanna Ostapkowicz follow with an introduction that nicely centers the chapters that follow around the titular theme of Florida's “watery realms.”
A few of the chapters consist of case studies that don't stray far—in terms of data or interpretation—from reporting on particular sites or assemblages. This is particularly true of the chapters by Daniel Seinfeld (the Fort Center site), Michael Faught and Michael Arbuthnot (the Chassahowitzka Headsprings), Phyllis Kolianos (the Key Marco and Weedon Island sites), and Karen Walker and colleagues (the Pineland Complex). Nevertheless, all of these make contributions that will be of interest to scholars and laypersons with an interest in Florida archaeology or wetsite archaeology more generally. Seinfeld lays to rest the earlier interpretation of a charnel platform at Fort Center, as suggested by William Sears, while better positioning the site in terms of time and larger cultural connections. Faught and Arbuthnot, in describing the rich finds from one of Florida's iconic springs, also document a strategy for underwater investigations of such sites. Likewise, Walker and colleagues describe an extraordinary wooden carving of a crane from the Pineland Complex, and they use this as a touchstone for generating hypotheses regarding the conditions under which waterlogged artifacts may be better preserved. Finally, Kolianos provides an important perspective on the curation of wood from two of Florida's most important wetsites, with lessons for those facing similar conservation issues.
The remaining chapters offer more synthesis and interpretation. Julia Duggins examines the geographic distribution of Florida's dugout canoes and offers keen insights with regard to why these artifacts cluster in particular locations on the landscape (drawing from analyses of physiographic features and historical and ethnographic accounts). Margaret Spivey-Faulkner takes a fresh look at the wooden representations of animals from the Fort Center site, partitioning them into novel categories that illustrate both similarities and differences with iconographic depictions from elsewhere in the American South. William Marquardt provides a useful descriptive summary of wooden statuettes from Florida sites, using this as a springboard to explore their importance for Native societies in the region. Similarly, Ostapkowicz and Wheeler describe the larger wooden representations of an owl, otter, and pelican from a mound complex in northeast Florida, which they relate to other artistic depictions of these animals elsewhere in the state, and they speculate on the symbolic and social importance of these statues and the creatures they represent.
The volume seems carefully and thoroughly edited. My only complaint relative to production is with the poor contrast (e.g., Figures 1.1 and 3.2) and the small size of the text and graphics (e.g., Figures 1.4 and 3.3) on several of the tables and figures. The majority of the figures, however, are of excellent quality.
In framing this volume, Wheeler and Ostapkowicz note that “water is the dominant feature of the Florida landscape, from hydrology to surface waters” and arguably continuing on even to the atmosphere when we consider the force of hurricanes (p. 57). With this in mind, they posit the questions, How is everyday life in ancient Florida connected to water? And can we even begin to understand a world view in which water is central? The contributions to this volume may not answer these questions, but they move us closer in that direction.
