Today the mounds and villages of the precolumbian native American Indians who once lived in Florida are still very much in evidence. In parks like Lake Jackson in the panhandle, Turtle Mound on the Atlantic coast, and Crystal River on the Gulf coast, modern Floridians can visit archaeological sites--shell and earthen middens and mounds--left by the native inhabitants of Florida. Remnants of thousands of other sites exist, although countless others have vanished under the onslaught of roads, buildings, and parking lots that are built each year in Florida to accommodate a continually growing population. Where Jacksonville, Tampa, Miami, and Disney World exist today, precolumbian populations once flourished.
Who were these native Florida Indians? How long were they here? How did they live? These are questions that we can answer using information gathered from a century or more of archaeological investigations.
From such research we know that at least several hundred thousand people, possibly more, were living in Florida in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century when Europeans first sighted the peninsula's coasts. Ancestors of those native Floridians had been here for 12,000 years. Over the millennia many different cultures had developed, adjusting to different environments and dealing with the problems and challenges presented by increasing populations, new ideas, and innovations. In 1492, at the time of Christopher Columbus's first . . .