A First Millennium A.D. Vegetation History from the Crystal River Site (8CI1), Florida.

While seldom integrated within coastal archaeological research in Southeastern North America, vegetation histories derived from palynological data offer valuable records of ancient landscape transformations driven by climatic flux, sea-level oscillations, and anthropogenic modifications. In this paper, we develop a paleo-historical-ecological reconstruction from preliminary analyses on fossil pollen assemblages preserved within marsh, hammock, and shell-midden soils at the Crystal River site (8CI1), a mound center on Florida's west-central coast occupied throughout the first millennium AD. When contextualized alongside paleoenvironmental records from western Florida and farther afield, our analysis suggests that the nature and timing of late-Holocene climatic changes varied little between different sub-regions of Florida's Gulf Coast, but also that manifestations of eustatic sea-level flux may have been highly localized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]