December 10, 2026: Dr. Traci Ardren

Chronology Building and Artifact Analyses to Understand the Earliest Occupants of the Florida Keys
Dr. Traci Ardren, Professor of Anthropology, University of Miami

Zoom link: https://tinyurl.com/CGCASdec2026

Cultural resources in the Florida Keys are experiencing accelerated threats of disturbance and sea level rise, creating an urgent need for greater understanding of these cultural sites. This talk will present the results of a suite of new analyses on materials recovered from four Ancestral (pre-European contact) sites in the Keys. Extensive new carbon 14 dating, ceramic petrography, hydrological research, artifact sourcing and faunal analyses provide a much deeper understanding of cultural developments in the Keys. I will summarize this new research in order to explore the historical ecology of early life in the Keys and situate the occupants of this unique region within the better documented political organization of the Calusa and Tequesta areas.

Dr. Traci Ardren is a Professor of Anthropology at the University of Miami. She received her PhD from Yale University. Her research focuses on issues of identity and other forms of symbolic representation in the archaeological record, especially the ways in which differences are explained through gender. Current preoccupations include the role of cuisine in identity formation in the later periods of Classic Maya culture and prehistoric southern Florida, as well as the ways we can read memories in ancient living spaces.