Submerged inland landscapes of the Aucilla basin, Northwest Florida, USA: populating the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene landscape

Stratigraphic Framework, Paleoenvironments, and Indigenous Terraforming of Inshore Estuarine Subbasins in Tampa Bay, Florida, U.S.A.

“…The geologic and paleoenvironmental histories of Holocene estuary evolution in Tampa Bay are interwoven with the cultural history of Indigenous land use and settlement, which extends back at least to the deglacial period of the late Pleistocene, ca . 14.5 kya (Halligan, 2022). This study shows that freshwater wetland systems were widely distributed throughout the Tampa Bay basin during the late Pleistocene, and not restricted to the previously studied Middle Tampa Bay depression (Cronin et al ., 2007; Willard et al ., 2007).…”

“…Indigenous peoples were present (and likely widely distributed) on the Florida peninsula by ca. 14.5 kya (Halligan, 2022;Halligan et al, 2016), and research from the greater Southeastern Coastal Plain indicates that terminal-Pleistocene human populations altered fire regimes and vegetation communities (Delcourt and Delcourt, 2004). The Tampa Bay watershed has yielded relatively high concentrations of Pleistocene-age projectile points (Daniel and Wisenbaker, 1987;Faught and Pevny, 2019;Goodyear et al, 1983).…”