Indigenous Knowledge and Its Opportunities to Break Out of Dichotomies

When stating that heritage is both people and environment, I am following the lead of the Indigenous people of Florida. In 2019, the Seminole Tribe of Florida combined its Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) and Environmental Resource Management Department (ERMD) into the Heritage and Environmental Resources Office (HERO; Backhouse Reference Backhouse2019). HERO integrates cultural and natural heritage in the face of climate change, and it recognizes and utilizes the holistic approach of Seminole peoples to their lands. The initiative of the Seminole Tribe of Florida overcomes dominant epistemological approaches in the United States. For instance, Robin Wall Kimmerer (e.g., Reference Kimmerer2013) expands on the epistemology of uniting the teaching from plants and scientific knowledge to gain wisdom.

Recent studies on climate change (e.g., Hollesen Reference Hollesen2022:1388) have stressed that “the vulnerability of archaeological sites can only be understood when the interactions between climate change and other factors . . . are also considered.” Those factors include the nuances of various landscapes. In studies of rising sea levels, there are two types of models. One is known as the “bathtub” model, which assumes uniformity to the rise, like water in a bathtub. The other is the “dynamic” model, where there is variation across the coastal zones, the interface between the land and water (Cochran et al. Reference Cochran, Thompson, Anderson, Hladik and Herbert2024). The dynamic model requires inclusion of multiple features and factors, including deep historical knowledge of place. Exemplifying this dynamic approach by HERO, the Lake Okeechobee Watershed Project critiqued the US Army Corps of Engineers’ plans for not recognizing the “risk of catastrophic flooding, to impact its cultural resources, and to impact its ability to access Lake Okeechobee water during times of drought for both the Brighton and Big Cypress Reservations;” HERO offers options “to make it viable by relocating project away from Reservation” (Heritage and Environmental Resources Office [HERO] 2023). Similarly, for the Western Everglades Restoration Project, HERO critiques “the current approach to utilizing keystone species (i.e., American alligator and wood stork) as bio-indicators, stating that it is an inappropriate representation of overall health of the habitats targeted for restoration. Furthermore, this approach is a particularly poor performance metric for assessing restoration success in forested wetland slough habitats” and “advocates for a ‘bottom-up’ approach for measuring and assessing restoration success that includes analyses of food webs” (HERO 2023). Both examples illustrate the integration of the historic/social and the environmental to produce sustainable, socially meaningful outcomes.

HERO is an inspiration and a pathway for heritage. Deep knowledge of the variation in places is community engagement in this age of rising sea levels that will impact communities in various ways and at different times. This vision of heritage expands a concept whose use has been growing in academic and popular discourse since the last quarter of the twentieth century. Heritage is a useful concept for grappling with the relationships of past and present, but it also has its dichotomies—most notably between tangible (physicality, such as landscapes, places, and objects) and intangible (what is experienced in the moment, such as dance, music, and stories) heritage. Those dichotomies, too, must be removed for effective action on preservation and adaptation. For example, since 2017, I have given many public lectures on climate change and archaeology (see Figure 2). Surprisingly often, after hearing about the archaeology of Florida and insights for confronting rising sea levels, audience members come up to me and then share that a fishing location that they frequented with a grandparent is no longer viable for fishing with their children. Such audience members came to a talk focused on archaeology, which traditionally is tangible heritage, but it was that intangible heritage—the tradition of fishing in a particular spot—that animates them. The intangible is as significant as historic structures and archaeological sites on the coast when our goal is to prepare residents and others for the landscape and coastal zone transformations of the next decades.

Figure 2.

Flyer for an example of a public presentation on heritage and rising sea levels in Florida.

This inclusive description of heritage is a pathway from the present to the past. Fryer (Reference Fryer2023) expands the concept further by focusing on what heritage does. For Fryer, heritage is liberation work “to right historical injustices, promote community solidarity, revise willfully ignorant or oppressively inaccurate historical narratives, use science to unmoor racism and sexism, and make available a means for economic emancipation and revival in marginalized and dispossessed communities” (Fryer Reference Fryer2023:4). The scope of this study contains those lofty goals, looking to engaging communities in envisioning a productive future in the face of climate challenges by offering examples of resolving dichotomies that haunt the discourse and representation of the new weather patterns of the Anthropocene.

The major dichotomy to overcome is the divide between culture/history and nature/environment. For studies of the past, there is another dichotomy: one between history and legends. People have lived in the land now called Florida for tens of thousands of years. The Spanish came in the sixteenth century; the United States took the territory in 1821; and yet Florida was an American frontier deep into the nineteenth century, with Florida growing rapidly only in the twentieth century due to representations of the place as a paradise (Revels Reference Revels2011). One legacy of the tourist representations of Florida is the reproduction of the Fountain of Youth legends across many locations, such as Warm Mineral Springs in North Port and the Fountain of Youth Archaeological Park in St. Augustine, that both confuse the history of the Ponce de Leon expedition—the search was for material wealth to extract—and deflect from the history of those locations.

That deflection leads to local nicknames for places that became names on the map. For examples from the Florida Gulf Coast, there is De Soto National Memorial, which commemorates the 1539 Hernando de Soto expedition, though the expedition actually landed to the north of the park. Another is Historic Spanish Point—since 2020, a campus of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens—which is named by the Anglo-American family that homesteaded the property in 1867 in recognition of a Cuban merchant who suggested the location since the people of Cuban were under Spanish rule. The place names confuse rather than illuminate the history of the places. Those obliquely named places face the challenge of rising sea levels. De Soto National Memorial, a unit of the National Park Service, sits at the mouth of one of the region's rivers. A 2007 report titled Small Park, Large Issues (Whisnant and Whisnant Reference Whisnant and Whisnant2007) recognizes that the commemoration of Hernando de Soto's 1539 expedition is problematic given the absence of evidence of the 622 Spanish conquistadors, 220 horses, and vicious war dogs that landed with the start of the remarkable four-year Spanish campaign across what is today the US Southeast. Yet, the park has significant heritage available for visitors, including the remnants known as the Tabby House Ruins, which stood near the point where the Manatee River enters Tampa Bay. Rising sea levels threaten the site with inundation and erosion, and excavating the site is therefore a means of preserving heritage in the face of these threats (Schwadron Reference Schwadron2021). Archaeological research in this location offers evidence for the history of a nineteenth-century Cuban fishing rancho and possibly the early nineteenth-century maroon community of Angola—two important contributions to the history of the region and for the heritage of descendant communities.

For Historic Spanish Point, the label “Spanish” represents the Cuban fishing rancho era on the Florida Gulf Coast (1770s–1840s), which did not leave a robust documentary or material imprint on the landscape. The more recent history includes mid-nineteenth-century homesteaders and an early twentieth-century estate, whose descendant donated the property for the museum. What dominates the landscape is massive ancient shell architecture, including a Late Archaic period shell ring and later period nearly kilometer-long (half-mile-long) coastal shell ridge, which are facing erosion as the waters of Little Sarasota Bay rise and the pathways at the museum face flooding (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Pathways on the water's edge at the Historic Spanish Point campus of Marie Selby Botanical Gardens (photo by Uzi Baram).

Visitors to both parks come for the trails and the scenic vistas, and the history is presented through signage and living history events, although lack of prior knowledge among most visitors means the messages are muffled. These are prime locations for sharing archaeological insights with community members to raise consciousness of the ongoing transformations and to offer community conversations about the decisions for our generation and their implications for future generations.

Talking and Researching

The methodology to break dichotomies integrates archaeology and ethnography. “Talking about it all” is a term I borrow from bell hooks (hooks and Mesa-Bains Reference hooks and Mesa-Bains2006) to invite concerns and questions from the interested public and potential stakeholders. Talking about it all is inspiration for moving beyond academic discourse, even when I stepped forward with my professor title, for recognizing that people's lived experiences are significant entryways for starting discussions, and for continually remembering that the scientific basis for understanding rising sea levels and climate change is only one element of persuading people to take action. With that inspiration for the last half dozen years, since Hurricane Irma (September 2017), I have engaged in community conversations, facilitated by cohosting the Florida Public Archaeology Network's Tidally United Summit in Sarasota in August 2018 (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Community Conversations and Concerns.

From discussions with government staff on the local/regional level, ecological organization members, and public audiences, it is apparent that there is a deficit of knowledge on the long history of the region, even when there is a robust heritage for Indigenous people, maroons, pioneers, and others in Florida. That vacuum is a continually reproduced urban legend of safety from storms, a fable I have needed to counter at the start of each hurricane season (traditionally June through November); too many community members state that Sarasota is safe from hurricanes because ancient Native American mounds protect the region. There have been hurricanes damaging Sarasota (Baram Reference Baram2017). With recognition that there is no magic safety shield, and that the actual history is more interesting than the fables, correcting these misconceptions facilitates parallel tracks that argue for preservation of the archaeological past and for documentation of heritage locations on the coast.

Sharing the deep history of the region and highlighting coastal locations to illustrate the imminent threat to heritage locations ignites productive climate conversations. Consulting with local governments and giving public presentations that highlight archaeology's lengthy temporal range has garnered support from multiple organizations and, after the virtual presentation during the 2020–2023 COVID-19 pandemic public health emergency, we now have the opportunity to return to coastal locations and use public forums to explore and contribute to questions that matter for the Florida Gulf Coast. Those efforts have led to exploring new methodologies to highlight the transformations to the coastal zone.

The methodology recognizes that the separation of natural and cultural heritage makes both ineffective. When environmentalists focus on “nature,” the historical social aspects of place are missing; when archaeologists speak of cultural resources, we seem to ignore the biological effects on the ruins. For example, endangered plants such as the prickly apple cactus (Harrisia aboriginum) thrive on Florida Gulf Coast shell middens. With erosion of such middens, the plant could go extinct. Below, an example from the Tabby House Ruins at De Soto National Memorial suggests the dangers from microbes on the ruins eroding into the sea as the sea level rises. The coming transformations of the coastal zone, whether from inundation or attempts to forestall the rising waters, intertwine the material heritage with what is considered the natural landscape. Talking about it all means exploring and discussing the social implications for people visiting the places on the coastal zone as well as the potential disruption for flora and fauna and the projected loss of archaeological locations on the coast.

Multiscalar Studies: Integrative Heritage on the Florida Gulf Coast

Warning of future dangers easily leads to gloom-and-doom scenarios that are disempowering and politically fraught. For the public presentations that provide the deep history for the region, the tens of thousands of years of Indigenous heritage and the adaptations and recent maladaptation leading up the present day, I ask audiences to imagine the future looking back at us as we have considered the previous generations and centuries. This is the key that has been opening up multiple paths to observe change. The goal has been to prepare for the inundated future of the Holocene past by recognizing the heritage of culture and history and environment and biology.

To develop a holistic heritage research methodology, teaming up with colleagues in biology who faced parallel frustrations that their research was missing the social element opened research to meet community needs. Our interdisciplinary research team used (1) a landscape approach to incorporate microbes, marine invertebrates, and plants and trees and (2) heritage locations in the study of the implications of rising sea levels across the coastal zone of two Florida counties. New College of Florida sits at the line between Sarasota and Manatee Counties, and the roughly 50 km regional view provides variation anchored by two publicly accessible coastal locations (see Figure 4).

Figure 4.

The Southwest Florida coast with places under study in the pilot program: De Soto National Memorial, New College of Florida, and Marie Selby Botanical Gardens’ Historic Spanish Point (all photos by Uzi Baram).

The choice to focus on coastal landscapes readily visited by the public is meant to facilitate public engagement with scientific research. We had a series of research questions that involved multiple levels of scale of visibility (see Table 2). On the smallest scale, we researched the microbes on historic architecture to create a baseline for change. This scale requires specialized skills by a microbiologist and was one of the innovations for the program. Documenting the changes on the microscopic level offers an immediacy for documenting the gradual changes, if any, to historic structures. Rather than wait for a dramatic image of a structure leaning into the sea, the microbes offer the opportunity to chart change for the microbes on the structures over a few years. The specific focus for the pilot project is the Tabby House Ruins at De Soto National Memorial (see Figure 5). Tabby is a construction material made by burning oyster shells to create lime, then mixing it with water, sand, ash, and broken oyster shells. Tabby seems to have been developed by Europeans in Florida; the first known tabby comes from the sixteenth-century Spanish settlement on Mound Key (Marquardt et al. Reference Marquardt, Thompson and Newsome2020). It was used extensively in the early to mid-nineteenth century across the Manatee River region and, coming from the sea, the oyster shell mixture erodes when exposed to water, but the decay is slow and noticeable only over decades. The goal of taking samples from the surface of the tabby and from excavations is a diachronic perspective on microbes over the next several years. These microbes are, hopefully, indicators for assessing the deterioration of tabby on other historic structures.

Table 2.

The Pilot Project for Integrative Heritage Research on the Florida Gulf Coast.

Figure 5.

Collecting microbiological samples from the Tabby House Ruins (photo by Uzi Baram).

Rising sea levels impact not only the coastal zone but also the subterranean infrastructure (see also Lecher and Watson Reference Lecher and Watson2021). Our research investigates how far saltwater invertebrates go into storm drains. Again, the study required specialized skills of the marine biologist, who placed tiles (bathroom tiles, with one side slick and the rough side up) near and in storm drains for a few weeks and then examined the animals attached to the tiles. The botanical scale fits the current work of most archaeological studies, recognizing the role of flora for reconstructing the environment as well as how plants sustain stabilization of material remains; at both locations, inventories of living plants allowed a baseline to identify future changes. The innovation added by this approach was to document trees and plants on and near historical sites with iNaturalist—a mobile app easily used by the undergraduates in the research team. The botanical research focused investigations on how site preservation correlates with rare and endangered plant survival.

On the landscape scale, and in line with archaeological approaches, the social aspects of sites are documented by participant observation at heritage locations, focusing on visible material culture, protective elements for the coastline, and a subjective sense of significance for the location. Including the structures and surface material culture covered in typical archaeological surveys, the ethnographic components provide the texture of how these two heritage locations are seen and experienced in order to assess what people will be losing—beyond just the material history—if and when these sites are damaged or erased by the transformations of climate change.

The research seeks comparisons across the region. The objectives of this climate change archaeology are beginning to contribute to the following:

• • Looking for and delineating change on the coast

• • Integrating the cultural and the natural

• • Documenting people's use of space as the coastal zone transforms

During the January 2021 pilot of the approach, the team could see that rising sea levels were already disrupting heritage locations, with signage becoming inundated and pathways flooded. The types of plants found by historical sites turned out to be medicinal, suggesting they descend from plants purposefully encouraged by the ancient communities at those locations. The findings from the study and inventory of marine invertebrates in storm drains were surprisingly sparse: just one species of Strombidium. The initial insight from the microbe study is their unexpected diversity on the tabby structure (Diaz-Almeyda and Baram Reference Díaz-Almeyda and Baram2021). Peycha (Reference Peycha2023) reported Bacillaceae, Vibrionaceae, Sphingomonadaceae, Nostocaceae, Oceanospirillaceae, Marinobacter, Pyrinonomdaceae, Leptolyngbya, and Cyclobacteriaceae as the most abundant taxa on and under the tabby; these findings are significant because Peycha (Reference Peycha2023) argues that, when inundated, they contribute to algae blooms. The Florida Gulf Coast has suffered from several years of heightened red tide (Karenia brevis), a phenomenon that causes respiratory irritations and kills marine life whose remains wash up on the shores. This raises a management question: whether to remove the tabby before the inundation or allow the tides from the rising seas to wash the tabby into the waters.

Finally, there is the heuristic contribution recognized by the undergraduates participating in the pilot project: by focusing on the landscape, the abstractions of climate change come into manageable view. By focusing on places that are visible to observers (the concept of landscape comes from art history and means what is seen by a person) rather than a global and overwhelming perspective, the students discussed ways they can contribute to documenting landscapes and to decisions about use of places as the sea rises. In many ways, the approach allows researchers to notice more—to metaphorically dig deeper into what is visible. Landscapes, as typically defined in archaeology (David and Thomas Reference David and Thomas2008), are a convergence of people and nature, past and present, and tangible and intangible values—a meeting place that is visual and invisible.

Conclusion: An Integrative Heritage Approach

As Marcy Rockman (Reference Rockman2022) noted in a recent essay, “Cultural heritage is strangely invisible in U.S. attention to climate change.” Integrative heritage research is self-reflective, and it recognizes that these studies will not prevent rising sea levels or reverse climate change. The holistic goal of integrative heritage research includes listening carefully to and learning from Indigenous perspectives to increase possibilities for productive, sustainable, future actions. As archaeology, history matters and, by focusing on this particular moment, the multiscalar approach can document a holistic view of coastal material heritage as experienced by people today.

The methodology described here is breaking down dichotomies between the cultural and natural by combining them into a holistic heritage for place in order to provide better guidance to policymakers and administrators for reducing coastal vulnerability. From my engagement, locally, green teams and sustainability officers are eager to integrate user experience at heritage locations into their efforts. This integrative heritage approach offers a unifying study of landscapes, given that the coastal zone is changing through rising sea levels. And it is an avenue for recognizing that documentation, monitoring, and then acceptance of decay—hopefully controlled—are the future of coastal zones.

The project for the Florida Gulf Coast is incomplete, however. It is based at New College of Florida, which underwent an institutional transformation in 2023, and three of the faculty members on the research team have left. The integrative heritage approach addresses the history and environmental aspects of place, teases out the relationships of plants and archaeological sites, and documents the social, material, and ecological aspects of a coastal location. Paying more attention to current political dynamics and their potential implications in sustaining community-based approaches is a consideration from our experience. The overall lesson—the productive interdisciplinary approach—opens up new opportunities to detail change that can resonate with community members and organizations.

Those processes of documentation and encouraging community conversations that facilitate saying farewell to landscapes can increasingly become part of archaeological heritage practice as a means to convey the past to future generations. We have vast challenges in front of us. Our only option is to complete the tasks that we can and encourage others to continue the efforts.