THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL POTENTIAL OF TAMPA BAY

During the 1960s & 1970s, local avocational archaeologists collected Paleoindian (ca. 11,000 years ago) through the Late Archaic (ca. 4500 years ago) artifacts from along the bay shore and from spoil and oyster shell dredged from Tampa Bay.  Marine geologists have shown that a large spring-fed, freshwater lake known as Paleo Lake Edgar once existed in the bay, and the ancestral Hillsborough River flowed south towards the Gulf of Mexico.  Raw material (chert) for tool production also is abundant in outcrops around and within the bay.

With lower sea levels and the Gulf of Mexico shoreline as much as 150 km to the west of the present coast, the availability of freshwater, plants, animals, and raw material in what is now Tampa Bay would have provided a major oasis near the center of the Florida peninsula for the first humans entering Florida 15,000+ years ago.  It is only by searching for early submerged sites that scientists will find the precursors to the early inland sites that, to date, have been our only sources of information about these ancient people.  Discovering and studying submerged sites can tell us much about who these people were, how they lived, how widespread they were, and how they adapted to long-term climate and environmental change.

The first step in conducting this research is to identify potential locations for deep coring and dive-team investigations, the goal of our current project.  During subsequent phases, we intend to collect artifacts and paleoenvironmental data from secure contexts and date these contexts using a variety of chronometric dating techniques.