Historical ecology has revolutionized our understanding of fisheries and cultural landscapes, demonstrating the value of historical data for evaluating the past, present, and future of Earth’s ecosystems. Despite several important studies, Indigenous fisheries generally receive less attention from scholars and managers than the 17th–20th century capitalist commercial fisheries that decimated many keystone species, including oysters. We investigate Indigenous oyster harvest through time in North America and Australia, placing these data in the context of sea level histories and historical catch records. Indigenous oyster fisheries were pervasive across space and through time, persisting for 5000–10,000 years or more. Oysters were likely managed and sometimes “farmed,” and are woven into broader cultural, ritual, and social traditions. Effective stewardship of oyster reefs and other marine fisheries around the world must center Indigenous histories and include Indigenous community members to co-develop more inclusive, just, and successful strategies for restoration, harvest, and management.
Recent archaeological excavations on the heads (i.e., the most elevated and upstream parts) of several large Everglades fixed tree islands may reshape what is understood about the age and formation of these landforms, and about the role of humans in the early Everglades wetland, between 3500 and 1000 B.C. Tree islands are patches of high ground, dry enough to support trees, that rise about 1 meter above the surrounding wetland, and those islands termed “fixed” are the large teardrop‐shaped islands thought to have formed over localized high points in the underlying bedrock (Figures 1a and 1b). A hard, cemented carbonate layer perched in the sediments of two tree islands in the southern Everglades was discovered by U.S. National Park Service archaeologists, and penetration of it with a concrete saw revealed that beneath the layer are unconsolidated sediments containing archaeological artifacts dating back to late‐Archaic times (3000–1000 B.C.) [Schwadron, 2006].
In southwestern Florida, USA, terraformed landscapes built almost entirely of oyster shells (Crassostrea virginica) reflect a unique pre-Columbian tradition of shell-built architecture. The ability to reliably date oyster shells is essential to identifying spatial, temporal, and functional relationships among shellworks sites, yet to date there has been no systematic attempt to quantify or correct for carbon reservoir effects in this region. Here we present 14 radiocarbon (14C) ages for 5 known-age, pre-bomb oyster shells collected between AD 1932–1948, as well as 6 14C ages for archaeological oyster/charcoal pairs from the Turner River Mound Complex, Everglades National Park. We report our current best estimate of ΔR = 92 ± 74 yr for Greater Southwest Florida, and ΔR = –15 ± 42 yr for the Turner River archaeological site. Future research should focus on paired archaeological specimens to obtain spatially and temporally relevant estimates of ΔR.
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