Caloosahatchee culture

The Caloosahatchee culture is the archaeological culture of the Gulf coast of south-west Florida, from Charlotte Harbor south to Estero Bay. It is defined mainly by its pottery and is usually said to begin around 500 CE and to last until about 1750. Without farming, its people built a dense, ranked society on the fish and shellfish of a rich estuary, and at the time of European contact they were the Calusa, the most powerful people of southern Florida.

The culture's core ran from southern Sarasota County, across Charlotte and Lee counties, as far as the northern fringe of Collier County, reaching some 90 kilometres inland. The Caloosahatchee, Myakka and Peace rivers, sheltered by a chain of barrier islands, feed shallow bays full of mangroves and seagrass, among the most productive waters in the region. People had been exploiting Charlotte Harbor intensively since before 3500 BCE. Plain pottery of the early Glades culture appeared around 500 BCE, and some accounts start the Caloosahatchee sequence there, while others begin it around 500 CE, when local pottery became distinct from the Glades tradition. The span is divided into five periods by ceramic style, with later periods marked by pottery imported or copied from other traditions. Fishing gear changed only gradually, with no break suggesting that one population replaced another.

By around 800 to 900 CE the region supported a complex society with a high population. Analysis of food remains shows that fish supplied 80 to 90 per cent of the animal food, mostly small species caught in nets of palm-fibre cord with set mesh sizes. Shellfish and crabs added more, while deer, ducks, alligators, turtles and manatees were minor foods. People also gathered palm fruit, prickly pear, sea grapes and other wild plants, and grew gourds for net floats and dippers. Limestone weights, shell hammers and cups, and bone points, pins and fish gorges are common finds.

Hundreds of sites are known, from small shell middens to large settlements with earthen and shell platform mounds, plazas, causeways, canals and so-called water courts. Mound Key in Estero Bay covers about 28 to 32 hectares, with mounds up to about 9 metres tall and a canal that runs more than halfway into the island and ends in a rectangular basin. It was probably Calos, the Calusa capital, where a Spanish eyewitness in 1566 described a chief's house said to hold 2,000 people.

Wet sites have preserved what is usually lost. At Key Marco, just south of the culture area but closely related to it, an expedition led by Frank Hamilton Cushing in 1896 recovered more than 1,000 wooden objects from a muck pond, including painted masks, carved animal heads, tablets, model canoes and a carved feline figure known as the Key Marco cat. They rank among the finest surviving Native American wood carvings.

Spanish accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries describe the Calusa as ruled by a paramount chief, a war leader and a chief priest, with influence over other peoples of southern Florida. The first recorded meeting with Europeans came in 1513, when Juan Ponce de León's ships were attacked by Calusa canoes. The Calusa resisted Spanish missions for nearly two centuries, but epidemics and, after 1702, slave raids by Creek and Yamasee warriors allied with the English colony of Carolina destroyed their society. Survivors withdrew south, and some were taken to Cuba in 1711; after Spain ceded Florida to Britain in 1763, the remaining peoples of South Florida were moved to Cuba.

Our maps label the area Caloosahatchee culture and draw it on the maps from 500 to 1400 and again in 1530 and 1600, on Florida's south-west coast in today's United States. The outline is approximate; later maps show the peninsula as Spanish Florida.