Presentation: Gourds, Mastodons, and Florida Indians: Insights into the Origins and Evolution of an Indigenous Paleoethnobotony

Please join us for a presentation on Florida paleoethnobotany, with emphasis on the data from wet sites like the Windover Site, near Titusville. Dr. Newsom is an archaeologist, paleoethnobotanist, and wood anatomist. Her research involves work with preserved plant remains from archaeological and paleontological sites, and is generally directed toward trying to unravel some of the deep history and inter-complexities of the human-environmental relationship. She works primarily with plant macroremains, including wood, seeds, and other organisms, and in a variety of preservation states (carbonized, waterlogged, desiccated). She employs these data sets to explore details of ancient environments and past biodiversity, and uses that as a basis on which to focus on human use of biotic resources, emphasizing subsistence systems, resource selection and sustainability, and the domestication of plant species, as a general approach to understanding the environmental, demographic, and social impacts of prehistoric and historic subsistence economies, the emergence of an agricultural way of life, and more. She works primarily in Florida and the Caribbean islands where in collaboration with other archaeologists she has identified the presence of ancient cultivars, plants used in ritual or for medicinal purposes, fuel and fiber resources, and more, along with evidence bearing on the sustainability of biotic resource use and economic practices. Cultural and island biogeographic factors have considerable relevance and inform much of her research.