A person attempting this same journey 12,000 years ago would not have gotten very far. The Ichetucknee River was not a flowing river, nor was the Santa Fe. Neither would have existed in its present form. At that time, the end of the Pleistocene Epoch—the great Ice Age—Florida was much drier than at present. Rather than flowing rivers, the limestone-bottomed Ichetucknee and Santa Fe rivers were probably a series of small watering holes that drew animals seeking water and humans seeking animals. In many respects the water holes were like the watering holes found today in the savannas of Africa. The paucity of surface water was the result of different rainfall patterns and a greatly lowered water table.

As might be expected, a drier environment meant a different array of plants and animals in addition to different land forms. If there is one thing we have learned about the archaeology of precolumbian people, it is that to understand them, we must understand their environment. That is not an easy task.

Were there actually people in Florida 12,000 years ago to paddle a canoe down the Ichetucknee River to the Gulf had there been water on which to do so? In the 1920s, when river traffic was practically nonexistent and the river had not yet suffered the indignity of having hundreds of thousands of pairs of feet dragged along its bottom, at least one family of north Florida visitors to the Ichetucknee did what no one else had apparently done. Instead of looking up while in the river, they looked down. The Simpson family of High Springs, one son of which was the same Clarence Simpson who served as archaeologist for the Florida Geological Survey in the 1930s, collected thousands of artifacts from the bed of the river. They installed glass bottoms in buckets, which could then be lowered into the water like giant swim masks, enabling them to get a better view of artifacts on the river bottom (Simpson, 1935). They later went so far as to invent a glass-bottomed rowboat in which one could float and see the river bottom.

The Simpsons’ collection includes artifacts from a cross-section of the native cultures who inhabited north Florida from Seminole times back well into the precolumbian era. One artifact aroused considerable scientific excitement. Two sections of a broken, beveled ivory point fit together in the shape of a tool identical to a beveled ivory point found at the famous Blackwater Draw archaeological site near Clovis, New Mexico. It was at Blackwater Draw that artifacts first had been found in undeniable association with the bones of now-extinct species of Pleistocene animals (Jenks and Simpson 1941). Here was strong evidence that humans lived in Florida as long ago as they did in the southwest United States, a region where only recently it had been shown that people had lived sufficiently long ago to have hunted Ice Age animals.

Today we know that the beveled ivory tool was a foreshaft, part of a composite harpoonlike spear point, and that it was made from the ivory tusk of a Pleistocene-age mammoth. Such ivory tools and the stone lanceolate points they held are excellent evidence of the presence of early humans. Many such tools have now been found in Florida in other inundated archaeological sites. As we shall see in chapter 2, people indeed lived in Florida 12,000 years ago.

Today we can begin to describe and interpret the lifeways of these people to whom the name Paleoindians is given, the same name given to contemporaneous cultures elsewhere in the United States. Our information about these early Floridians is increasing almost daily. Much of this new knowledge comes from a better understanding of the Florida environment of the Paleoindians. Work by people like James Dunbar, Melanie Stright, S. David Webb, and their associates is demonstrating that there is great potential for learning even more about the Florida Paleoindians, and that such information is going to influence Paleoindian studies throughout the hemisphere.

Paleoindians lived in Florida relatively unchanged for several thousand years. Two phenomena probably account for the gradual development after about 7500 B.C.—9,500 years ago—of new lifeways and the onset of what archaeologists call the Archaic period. First is the end of the Pleistocene—the Ice Age—and the onset of the Holocene epoch—modern times. As the glaciers in colder climes around the world melted, sea levels rose and wetter conditions appeared. Some of the Pleistocene animals hunted by Paleoindians disappeared, the victims of native hunters, new environmental conditions, or both. Along the coasts and in the rivers new resources were available for the taking, and Archaic populations quickly took advantage of them. Fish and shellfish were probably added to a wide variety of plants and animals that had long been a part of the human diet.

Changes in settlements and social structure probably also occurred as a result of the second factor: population increase. People make more people, especially under favorable environmental and economic conditions. After 7500 B.C. northern Florida, the home of most Paleoindians, became more densely populated, a result of both more people and the fact that Florida was literally shrinking. As sea levels rose, inundating large expanses of coastal lands, the area of Florida was eventually reduced by roughly half. With wetter conditions, some portions of Florida previously inhospitable or only lightly populated during Paleoindian times became the home of expanding Archaic populations. More surface water supported more people.

The Archaic peoples, like their Paleoindian predecessors, knew the land and how to live on it. Over the next thousands of years they would inhabit almost all, if not all, areas of the state, taking advantage of the resources of the coasts, the interior rivers and lakes, and the expanses of interior hardwood forests.

That Archaic populations were larger than Paleoindian populations is difficult at the present time to prove. If we begin to compare the number of Paleoindian sites to the number of Archaic sites, however, compensating for the longer duration of the Archaic period (about twice the Paleoindian period), it seems obvious that populations were significantly larger in the Archaic period. Not only are there more sites, there are also larger sites, reflecting larger populations, repetitive occupations, or both. As a consequence, there are many more Archaic artifacts in archaeological collections than Paleoindian artifacts.

For instance, from the Ichetucknee River we have handfuls of Paleoindian projectile points and tools, while from the same locale we have hundreds and perhaps thousands of Archaic artifacts. All of the available evidence points to larger human populations in Florida during the Archaic period.

It should be emphasized that although the relative amount of Paleoindian artifacts is many orders of magnitude less than Archaic artifacts, the total amount of Paleoindian artifacts from Florida is quite large when compared with quantities from other locations in the eastern United States. So there were significant Paleoindian populations in the state, but there were even larger Archaic populations.

The cultures of the Archaic period were not a single entity, static in time. Fluctuating environmental conditions and cultural changes characterized the period from 7500 B.C. to 500 B.C. Archaic cultures and the environment of Florida in 7500 B.C. were quite different than the cultures and environment of 500 B.C. The style of life during the early Archaic period, until about 5000 B.C., probably was more similar to that of the Paleoindians than it was to those of later cultures. After 5000 B.C., middle Archaic societies sharing similar lithic assemblages were living in a wide variety of environmental zones—riverine and inland, wetland and forest areas. Some sites are quite large. By 3000 B.C., the time of the appearance of late Archaic cultures, essentially modern environmental conditions were reached. After that time coastal Archaic occupations became more numerous; the remains of late Archaic cultures are especially noteworthy along the southwest Florida coast and the salt marsh-barrier island regions of northeast Florida, two relatively propitious coastal locales important to later peoples as well. By the end of the late Archaic period we can begin to see the regionalization that characterized the many cultures of later times.

Earlier Archaic populations may have lived along the coasts, but as yet remains comparable to those of the late period have not been found. This could be a result of the inundation of those earlier sites, such as in the Tampa Bay locale, where dredging has uncovered extensive inundated shell middens.

Exactly when to end the Archaic period is a topic of taxonomic debate. The appearance of fired clay pottery in coastal sites after about 2000 B.C. or slightly earlier provides a convenient marker, causing some chronologies to terminate the late Archaic period at that point. In such chronologies the late Archaic period is followed by the Orange period, 2000-1000 B.C., and the Transitional period, 12,000-500 B.C., two divisions that fill the temporal gap to the time of regional cultures (Bullen 1975: 6). But evidence from excavated sites increasingly indicates that late Archaic lifeways continue unchanged to 1000 or 500 B.C. in most regions of the state, especially in riverine and coastal locales. An alternative taxonomic scheme, the one used in this book, is to extend the late Archaic period to 500 B.C., recognizing that there are at least several discernible geographic varieties of late Archaic cultures in Florida and that those cultures are transitional to the better-defined regional cultures present after 500 B.C. Taxonomies are heuristic devices that help to organize data: as additional data are collected and new conclusions reached, taxonomies should be revised.

In the chapter that follows we will examine the archaeological evidence for Paleoindians in Florida and the interpretations archaeologists have made from those data. Chapter 3 looks at the Archaic cultures in Florida and the nature of the adaptations those people made to the different environmental zones and resources within the state over time. By 500 B.C. the development of regional cultural adaptations resulted in a host of distinct cultures that can be described and studied by modern archaeologists. The descendants of those regional cultures—people called the Calusa and Apalachee and Potano—lived in Florida in the early sixteenth century. It was their ancestors who were there 12,000 years ago in places like the Ichetucknee River.

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From Chapter 2, The Paleoindians (pp. 43-44)

New information on Paleoindians in Florida continues to surface, and all of it supports the oasis model. The most recent distribution maps of Paleoindian points in Florida show that 92 percent of Clovis and Suwannee projectile points—diagnostic Paleoindian artifacts—are found in the region of Tertiary limestone features (Dunbar 1991). This region, extending from Tampa Bay north into the panhandle, includes the Santa Fe River-Ichetucknee River basin, where the largest numbers of points have been found; the Aucilla River-Wacissa River basin; the Steinhatchee River; the Oklawaha River-Silver River system; the Withlacoochee River (in west central Florida); the Hillsborough River; the Chipola River; and, to a lesser extent, the St. Johns River (Dunbar, Webb, and Cring 1989; 475; Dunbar 1991).

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From Chapter 3, Archaic Cultures (p. 67)

Undoubtedly many tools were made from bone, but because of the acid nature of Florida soils, none have been preserved in land sites. Large numbers of bone tools have been recovered, however, from Florida rivers, especially the Ichetucknee River, thanks again to the Simpson family of High Springs. These bone tools cannot absolutely be attributed to the early Archaic period, but the large numbers of Archaic-period projectile points found with them strongly suggest that such tools were used throughout the early and middle Archaic periods.

The variety of bone artifacts preserved in the Ichetucknee River almost equals that of the stone tools. Double-pointed points made from bone splinters, flat or lenticular in cross section, are similar to bone tools from the Paleoindian period. Very common, the points may have been used as spear tips, or several may have been hafted together on a shaft to make a fishing gig. One such point with a small bone barb attached to the tip with pitch has been found by divers in the Oklawaha River. Carved barbed points—some with multiple barbs—and bone pins are less common, and socketed antler points are rarer still. Barbara Purdy’s (1973) summary of the distributional data relating to these bone tools also suggests they were used throughout the Archaic periods.

Other bone tools from the Ichetucknee River in the Simpson Collection are fish hooks, throwing-stick weights, socketed antler handles, throwing-stick triggers, splinter awls, deer-ulna awls, beaver teeth showing evidence of hafting, and antler punches. It should be stressed again that these same tool types probably were used over thousands of years.