The Calusa were well established, with a population of several thousand. According to eyewitness accounts, in 1566 over 4,000 people gathered to witness ceremonies in which the Calusa king made an alliance with Spanish governor Menéndez de Avilés. The king entertained the governor in a building so large that 2,000 people could stand inside.
The Spaniards witnessed elaborate rituals with synchronized singing and processions of masked priests. Inside a great temple, they observed walls covered by carved and painted wooden masks. The Calusa king had the power of life and death over his subjects and was thought by them to be able to intercede with the spirits that sustained the environment’s bounty. Commoners supported the nobility and provided them with food and other material necessities. Towns throughout south Florida sent tribute to the Calusa king.
The level of southwest Florida political complexity is noteworthy because they depended for food mainly on fishing, hunting, and gathering. Although they probably kept small home-gardens, they raised no corn, beans, or manioc. Most complex societies depend on one or more staple crops and on the ability to distribute a surplus. We know from our study of both historical and archaeological data that the Calusa and their neighbors raised no such staple crops. How did the Calusa manage this unusual feat? One answer is found in the productive estuarine environment of the southwest Florida Gulf coast.” Credit Florida Museum of Natural History.
“Rich inshore food resources were vital to the coastal Calusa, who were primarily a fishing people. The mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, and mud flats near the coast provided the energy base for a complex food web as well as nutrition and safe havens for small fishes. Some scholars have argued that the Calusa became socially complex and politically powerful without recourse to plant and animal husbandry due mainly to their exceptionally bountiful coastal environment. However, more recent research shows that resources were spatially and temporally variable. Based on our accumulated information, we think that changes in settlement, subsistence, technology, and cultural practices were associated significantly with environmental fluctuations. The responses to them reveal a process of learning about and adjusting to an environment that was bountiful during long stretches of time, paltry and unforgiving during others, and possessed of a capacity to devastate with little warning. Calusa adaptations included a belief system that valued the knowledge of the elders and even the deceased; engineering skills that improved living conditions and enhanced cultural connections, and buffering mechanisms that allowed the resilient Calusa to survive, and even to prosper, during periodic episodes of resource deprivation.Both environmental conditions and specific historical processes can lead to higher or lower levels of social complexity. In typical chiefdoms, centralizing and decentralizing tendencies exist in opposition. Moreover, chiefdoms do not exist in isolation but are related to broader-scale ideological, exchange, and political systems that are themselves dynamic and influenced by environmental and historical processes. When populations expand, either from internal population increases or by means of conquest or encapsulation, food production must increase.
One of the ways in which the Calusa may have been able to intensify their food production was by means of large-scale fish weirs, wing dams, traps, and holding pens. Linear keys still visible today in the greater Charlotte Harbor estuarine system that was the heartland of the Calusa cannot be explained by modern dredging, and may be the remnants of elaborate large-scale fishing facilities. South Florida natives had several different kinds of watercraft, including seagoing vessels, small cargo canoes, and barges made of platforms connecting two parallel canoes.
The Calusa and other south Florida Indians are known to have engineered substantial canals (e.g., Josslyn Island, Big Mound Key, Mound Key, Pineland, Naples, and the Lake Okeechobee area), both within their island settlements and between their towns and interior waterways. The paths of these canals are clearly visible on aerial photographs of the area taken prior to modern development, and are described in detail by explorers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1895 and 1896, when Frank Cushing visited the Pineland Site Complex, parts of the Pine Island Canal were still 30 feet wide and 6 feet deep.
The Calusa were characterized by most or all of the conditions known to foster the emergence of ranked societies, and probably functioned intermittently as a weak tribute-based state during the post-contact period. However, the extreme complexity and instability reported by the Spaniards was probably conditioned by internal conflicts and stimulated by their reactions to European commerce and militarism.” Credit Florida Museum of Natural History.
Sections
Pineland Shell Mounds
Cross Island Canal Dug by the Calusa
Ponce de Leon Discovers the Calusa
Ponce de Leon Brings First Cattle & Horses To The New World
Calusa Interaction with Missionaries
This Chapter Indians of Pine Island
Next Chapter Early Inhabitants