Intended for policy planners, general readers, and specialists alike, this volume contains a preface, eight chapters (with 10 tables, 42 maps, and 25 photographs), an index, references, and a foreword by Jerald T. Milanich, editor of the Florida Museum of Natural History's Ripley P. Bullen Series. Because of dissatisfaction with the perception that archaeology has limited relevance to contemporary problems, Miller attempts to reconcile the past and the future by examining whether an understanding of what happened to people and environments in the past is useful for making decisions about the future. This objective is accomplished within a broad framework that covers the region of the St. Johns River and the Atlantic Coast, spans the interval from 18,000 years ago to the first half of the 20th century, and has Native Americans, Spanish, English, and Americans (Colonial, Territorial, U.S.) as the cultural players, each with their own response to changing opportunities and constraints as the environment itself changed. Miller describes how natural features of the landscape and a succession of cultures influenced and transformed one another.
Miller's analysis is conducted through a series of consistently scaled maps of the region. Each map depicts a different natural or cultural factor, with the extra dimension of time being the key to constructing an environmental history. The overlays illustrate how environmental (natural) factors provided opportunities and constraints for human activities at different periods.
Chapter 1 sets the stage by providing an overview of the people and land; subsections discuss the purpose of the study, and the geology, physiography, soils, climate, hydrology, drainage, vegetation, fauna, modern land use, and history of the region. The subsection on purpose devotes considerable space to the relatively new discipline of environmental history, which is the dialectic between culture and nature, i.e., how environment affects people and how people affect environment. Environmental History's underpinning is largely the cultural materialist theory of anthropologists. The author's goal is to use the northeast Florida environment as a historical case study. Northeast Florida is of special interest because of a comprehensive documentary record of human settlement and landscape modification that begins at an early date. Explored are the concept of nature undisturbed by humans, the ways we affect other aspects of the environment and how it affects us, and the proper role of humans in the environment. Miller argues for the value of environmental history in the formulation and implementation of public policy, which, all too often, is based more on public opinion than on a scientific understanding of cause and effect. A common thread running through all subsections of the first chapter, beginning with the overview of the region, is the fundamental importance of landscape characteristics inherited from marine processes, particularly changes in sea level.
Chapters 2-7 present the natural and human history of the region in chronological order, beginning at ca. 18,000 years ago during the last glacial maximum and continuing with the succession of cultural adaptations up to the 20th century. The prehistoric and early historic aboriginal occupation of northeast Florida is covered in Chapters 2-4. Chapter 2 considers late Pleistocene environments (18,000-15,000 yr B.P.) and Paleoindians in the late glacial landscape (15,000-10,000 yr B.P.). Chapter 3 covers the postglacial to essentially modern environments, characterized by hunting and gathering adaptations (Early Archaic, 10,000-7000 yr B.P.; Middle Archaic, 7000-5000 yr B.P.; Late Archaic, 5000-2500 B.P.). Chapter 4 presents the development of indigenous social stratification, as represented by the St. Johns Tradition (2500-500 yr B.P.-St. Johns I and II with subperiods).
The historic era, beginning with the initial European encounter, is discussed in Chapters 5-7. Patterns of European contact and colonization, with considerations of exploration and discovery (1500-1562) and French and Spanish colonization (1562-1600), are covered in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 deals with patterns of European settlement and international dependence through examination of Native subjugation (1575-1600), Spanish missionary work (1600-1650), Spanish ranching and defense (1650-1763), British Colonial Grants (1763-1784), and Spanish Land Grants (1784-1821). American agriculture, industry, and tourism are presented in Chapter 7 with discussions of territorial plantations (1821-1845), regional integration (1845-1920), and the modern landscape beginning in 1920.
Chapter 8 integrates the previous chapters by addressing the general issue of how people and the