Searching for the first people in Florida: Underwater prehistoric archaeology is the best path forward.
with David Thulman
For over a century, Florida has produced evidence of the earliest people in the New World. In contrast to its wet, lush modern environment, during the Late Pleistocene, Florida was a drier and less hospitable place and twice its present size due to lower sea levels. In this talk, I’ll discuss several underwater prehistoric projects that have uncovered human interactions with extinct animals, large cemeteries, and rare ivory, bone, and wooden artifacts. The latest technological innovations that promise to make underwater prehistoric archaeology more productive will also be reviewed.
David Thulman is from Washington, DC, where he spent his formative years in the Smithsonian Natural History Museum dreaming of becoming a paleontologist or anthropologist studying human evolution. He got an anthropology degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1978 but took a detour to the George Washington University Law School, where he graduated in 1982 with a concentration in environmental law. He spent over 20 years with the Florida environmental departments litigating environmental violations. In 1995, he volunteered on an underwater archaeology site near Tallahassee and was hooked when it was clear that hanging out with archaeologists and graduate students was so much more fun than dealing with lawyers. He went to graduate school at Florida State University and received his PhD in 2006. He moved back to the DC area and has been teaching at George Washington University since 2007. He is president of the Archaeological Research Cooperative, Inc., which focuses on prehistoric underwater archaeology in Florida.