Rare pre-Columbian settlement on the Florida Gulf Coast revealed through high-resolution drone LiDAR

Terry E. Barbour; Kenneth E. Sassaman; Angelica Maria Almeyda Zambrano; Eben North Broadbent; Ben Wilkinson; Richard Kanaski

doi:10.1073/pnas.1911285116

New Research In

Edited by Christopher B. Rodning, Tulane University, New Orleans, LA, and accepted by Editorial Board Member Elsa M. Redmond October 4, 2019 (received for review July 5, 2019)

Significance

An unexpected discovery made during the environmental impact surveys after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 was the remains of an ancient village on the northern Gulf Coast of Florida. Drone-mounted LiDAR reveals a complex of 37 rings of oyster shell, and archaeological testing shows that each of the households occupying the rings produced large numbers of beads from the shells of marine gastropods. Shell beads were integral to the political economy of chiefdoms in eastern North America, but archaeologists have very little knowledge about bead making at the source of the shells. The Raleigh Island village of AD 900 to 1200 is unprecedented in its architecture, its scale of bead production, and its place in regional geopolitics.

Abstract

Drone-mounted, high-resolution light detection and ranging reveals the architectural details of an ancient settlement on the Gulf Coast of Florida without parallel in the Southeastern United States. The Raleigh Island shell-ring complex (8LV293) of ca. 900 to 1200 CE consists of at least 37 residential spaces enclosed by ridges of oyster shell up to 4 m tall. Test excavations in 10 of these residential spaces yielded abundant evidence for the production of beads from the shells of marine gastropods. Beads and other objects made from gulf coastal shell were integral to the political economies of second-millennium CE chiefdoms across eastern North America. At places as distant from the coast as the lower Midwest, marine gastropods were imported in raw form and converted into beads and other objects by craftspeople at the behest of chiefs. Bead making at Raleigh Island is exceptional not only for its level of production at the supply end of regional demand but also for being outside the purview of chiefly control. Here we introduce the newly discovered above-ground architecture of Raleigh Island and outline its analytical value for investigating the organization of shell bead production in the context of ancient political economies. The details of shell-ring architecture achieved with drone-mounted LiDAR make it possible to compare the bead making of persons distributed across residential spaces with unprecedented resolution.

Footnotes

↵¹To whom correspondence may be addressed. Email: terry.e.barbour{at}ufl.edu or sassaman{at}ufl.edu.

Author contributions: T.E.B. and K.E.S. designed research; T.E.B., K.E.S., E.N.B., and R.K. performed research; T.E.B., K.E.S., A.M.A.Z., E.N.B., and B.W. analyzed data; and T.E.B. and K.E.S. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no competing interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission. C.B.R. is a guest editor invited by the Editorial Board.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10.1073/pnas.1911285116/-/DCSupplemental.

Published under the PNAS license.

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