Drawing on social theory, he convincingly posits that these ancient “garbage dumps” were actually burial mounds, ceremonial gathering places, and often habitation spaces central to the histories and social geography of the hunter-gatherer societies who built them. Johns freshwater shell sites since the late nineteenth century. Randall presents the first synthesis of the St. Large accumulations of ancient shells on coastlines and riverbanks were long considered the result of garbage disposal during repeated food gatherings by early inhabitants of the southeastern United States. In doing so, I hope to emphasize that new research questions have effects on the generation of new knowledge equal to or greater than those of new methods and techniques. Instead, I will discuss four new discoveries resulting from the application of a critical interdisciplinary approach. I will not attempt to do this by showing how new, improved methods are better than had old methods. In this chapter, I hope to convince the reader of the vitality and relevance of interdisciplinary environmental archaeology. This technique leads to fundamentally different interpretations of the diet and environment than were obtained by previous investigators who used coarser-mesh screens. For example, archaeobotanists and zooarchaeologists nowadays routinely apply fine-screen recovery methods. That is, the questions we ask lead to the development of methods appropriate to our questions, and the methods frequently determine the knowledge we gain. ![]() ![]() Like all archaeology, environmental archaeology is a discovery process in which one often finds what one looks for, but only what one looks for. As will become obvious to the reader, teamwork enhances environmental archaeology. My work has been enhanced by a team of colleagues and students without whom I would have learned considerably less. For the past ten years, I have investigated the archaeology and environment of southwest Florida.
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