Examination of Soil Cores in Search of Tempestological Events along the Ancient Florida Gulf Coast

Hurricanes and other major storm events are a challenge for any coastal community, both modern and past. During the past half-century hurricanes caused nearly half a trillion dollars in property damage throughout the Southeastern United States. Archaeological evidence supports the fact that humans have lived along the Florida Gulf Coast for at least the past 14,500 years. Based on the periodicity of tropical cyclone events over the past 5,000 years, it is highly likely ancient coastal peoples would have been impacted. The impact catastrophic storms had on past societies is poorly understood, primarily because evidence of hurricane activity is not always clearly identifiable. Thus, for this thesis, I am looking for these signatures in archaeological sites. In this thesis, I present the results of my analysis of auger cores taken from two locations along the Big Bend Region of the Florida Gulf Coast. Both locations, Bald Point State Park and the Woodland period Mound Field site (8WA8) in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, were directly impacted by Hurricane Michael in 2018 and Hurricane Irma in 2017, as well as several other tropical cyclone events in the past decade. The deposits at Bald Point State Park were used to create a “hurricane deposit” signature in this area. This was then applied to the deposits taken from Mound Field. The decision to use cores was made to maximize the collection of the foraminifera or other bioindicators of washover events. A noticeable change in siliciclastic grain size was observed illuminating evidence of a flooding event associated with a hurricane.