Middens

Middens

Early human society in Florida

Published in Howard T. Odum, Elisabeth C. Odum, Mark T. Brown, Environment and Society in Florida, 2018

Howard T. Odum, Elisabeth C. Odum, Mark T. Brown

The climate and vegetation changed. For example, pollen records in lake sediments show cypress moving into Florida about 4000 years ago. By 2000 B.C. (B.C. means “before Christ”), the large game animals were gone. The native Indian system that developed was more complex. Some tribes had long-standing villages at the margins of the west coast estuaries where there were reliable supplies of shellfish, shrimp, and fish supported by the marshes and grassflats. The sites of these villages are marked, even now, by shell middens. Middens are shell piles accumulated over a long period. In a way, they could be called primitive garbage dumps.

The paleotsunami record of the Auckland region and implications for understanding tsunami hazards

View Article

Journal Information

Published in New Zealand Journal of Geology and Geophysics, 2022

Kate Clark, Regine Morgenstern

The NZPD has an entry for Okiwi, a site located ∼2 km south of the Whangapoua Bay gravel deposit. This site has a poor validity ranking and the NZPD entry describes the evidence as a ‘modified soil’ with additional notes saying there is a ‘much disturbed midden’ and hummocky topography (‘or tsunami geomorphology’) was observed. We could not find descriptions matching a ‘much disturbed midden’ in the primary reference material of Prince and Clough (2001) and evidence for paleotsunami at Okiwi seems highly subjective.

Explore chapters and articles related to this topic

Early human society in Florida

The paleotsunami record of the Auckland region and implications for understanding tsunami hazards