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Sadly American Indians have been viewed by history as a primitive people, living at the shadowy edge of a more sophisticated European world. But in recent years archaeological evidence has revealed that there has been human occupation in Florida stretching back more than fourteen thousand years. Furthermore, dates from sites in both South America and North America suggest an entry date of around thirty thousand years ago for the first humans. One point of view suggests that it was a single migration from western Siberia. An alternative viewpoint looks at the Eskimos as the most recent people in a series of migrations. The most modern evidence suggests that the native people began to migrate to the America's before Asian features were fully established. Whatever the argument, it is clear that native people have a deep history within our landscape.

Discovering the native people and their relationship to their landscape is often fraught with Eurocentric ideas and images. Their use of plants can be a flash-point in many a discussion. It has been commonly believed that the native people of Tampa Bay did not grow corn. In April 1528, Cabeza de Vaca on the Narvaez expedition describes corn at the northern part of Tampa Bay. Chroniclers on the De Soto expedition suggest that corn was available in a more northerly location from where they landed. It is believed that they landed on the south shore of Tampa Bay near the Manatee River.

Some modern scholars point out that the word "corn" was a common European word for "grains." The Ancient Greeks used the term "corn." However Cabeza de Vaca uses the term "maize" to describe the familiar grain in his possession.

"We followed the shore of the bay, and, after a march of four leagues, captured four Indians, to whom we showed maze in order to find out if they knew it, for until then we had seen no trace of it. They told us that they would take us to a place where there was maize and they led us to their village at the end of the bay nearby."

The world of these ancient people becomes lost in a tangle of semantics.

The Pueblo people, the Zuni and the Hopi, are clearly a corn culture. They live in a harsh desert environment which affords them few choices. Only a limited variety of plants can survive. A single crop, or a reliance on a handful of hardy crop plants should be expected. Consider for a moment the origins of Europe’s most productive crops prior to its discovery of the Americas. Most have their roots in the desert environments of the Middle East.

The Tocobaga may have viewed the agricultural method of planting vast plots with a single crop as creating a desertlike environment. Florida has one of the most complicated environmental systems in North America. It is home to at least 300 varieties of native grasses alone. One hundred and forty kinds of Florida trees do not grow north of its border. For the native people to developed a reliance on a few plants would not have made sense. To introduce a single kind of agriculture into this system would have not benefited them.

The Europeans who came here to settle, viewed the verdant landscape with great hope for their rigid paradigm of farming. First, they cleared the land. In other words, they created a desert. Then they planted one kind of crop in each plot. Next they kept out the weeds, and harvested thier crop at the end of the season.

There are many examples of crop failure with the pioneers. The Sea Breeze, the first newspaper published in Gulfport, Florida, points to it. Over and over, again people of European extraction, attempted to farm in a way which was not adapted to this environment. The European formula was, and still is for the most part, to make the landscape adapt to their needs. Florida’s sandy soils, seasonal flooding, and drought, did not support the European vision of agriculture.

The native people, with their deep roots in this landscape, probably tried many ways to increase the assurance of their resources. Certainly, there were many failures. Adaptation would have taught them the best crops for this landscape and how to encourage their productivity.

Plants and their uses leave little evidence in the archaeological record. Because of this we must start out with the most obvious examples of what is not there. A projectile point without a shaft is pretty much useless. Most of the ancient projectile points, found in the Tampa Bay area, were connected to some kind of woody shaft. Giant cane, Arundinaria gigantea, was pointed out to the Spanish as the preferred choice of shaft. It certainly works wonderfully with an atlatl (throwing stick). Light, easily straightened, and strong, cane can be propelled to great distances with little effort. The atlatl throws five times as far as a hand-thrown spear. Once discovered, it would have replaced any hardwood for making shafts. The atlatl itself was made of a wooden board with a bone hook.

What other uses plants had in Paleo times is only conjecture. Archaeology, a mostly masculine pastime in its early years, was an endeavor of the idly rich and treasure hunters. Therefore the identification of artifacts reflected a strong masculine bias with a European flavor. For instance the strangely curved "fore-shafts" carved from the ivory tusks of mammoths and mastodons work much better as tools for weaving rather than for hunting. We are led to imagine the native people wore only leather clothing. However woven cloth was discovered at the Windover Pond site neat Titusville that dates back 8,500 years ago. Woven cloth is lighter, it breathes, and it wears better in a damp environment like Florida. Juan Ponce de Leon reported in 1513 that native word for Florida was "cautió" meaning breech-cloth. Other early visitors to Florida also reported seeing men wearing woven breech-cloths woven of silk grass.

Digging sticks made from the ribs of mammoth suggest that paleo-women were digging tubers of some kind. Worn mammoth patella, knee caps, suggest that they were used in a grinding process, possibly to grind plant material. The earliest people appear to be a traveling folk. Certainly homes were made of material easily carried and easily harvested. Their homes were probably roofed with palm thatch over a frame of stripped saplings, then enclosed with walls of matting. Twine and rope would have been a necessary part of any building material. Although sinew could be used, twine made from plant fiber is much more versatile in any weather. Carved wooden stakes have been found embedded in the limestone around the mouth of Little Salt Springs, dating to the Paleo period. Were ropes tied to these stakes in order to lower something or someone into the sink-hole?

The Early Archaic Windover site, near Titusville, offers our first real glimpse into the relationship with early people and the plants in their surroundings. These ancient people buried their dead in a swampy bog. The anaerobic (oxygen free) environment of these burials preserved amazing things. Wood, fiber and even some stomach and intestinal contents were preserved. Archaeologists, trained in the newest theoretical techniques, helped us look back to a time between 8000 to 8500 years ago. What they discovered was a very different Native People than described by the Spanish or the French. These were a people who spun fiber, wove fabric, and used cloth. The fabric was beautifully crafted and fine. Nine different weaving styles turned up at the site. Their burials were wrapped in fabric and laid on matting.

Matting, woven bags, and cordage were common to these people. Much of the fiber seems to be Sabal Palmetto. There is the evidence of a yucca-like fiber, silk grass, Adam's needle, or Bear grass.

A wide range of wood was used, including a hickory handle for a hammer and a bowl carved from oak. Because they buried their dead in shallow water—the water of rebirth, the "fountain of youth" —so to speak, they needed to keep the bodies from floating. They pinned them down using sharpened wooden stakes. Some of the stakes, and covering litter, seems to be made from local deadfall branches. These branches may help describe that early Archaic environment. Other stakes have been purposely cut and carved.

The Key Marco site was a jumble of wooden art and artifacts. Marco Island is south of Naples. In 1923, Frank Hamilton Cushing excavated a site at the Northeastern end of Marco Island. Old timers remember the site as a forest of pilings. Some referred to it as the city of pilings. The site may have been a huge stilt city. Corrected dates of the artifacts range from 690 A.D. to 920 A.D. What came up out of the ground was an amazing array of wooden artifacts. Handles for a variety of picks and hammers, what looks like pieces of a loom, parts of a wooden box, masks, a canoe paddle, things just poured out of the archaeological site. It was the first time fish net came to light. Bottle gourds were found in association with netting and it is assumed they were used as net floats.

Key Marco is the first evidence of a material culture based on a foundation of wood. The sad truth, is that Frank Cushing had little of the expertise or technology which could have given us detailed information. How much fabric, matting, thatching and other information about the Calusa use of plants was lost?

Fort Center in the Everglades also came up with carved wood artifacts. Corn pollen found at the site is the focus of an academic battle.

What can we learn about the ancient viewpoint by studying modern Indians? According to some contemporary scholars—nothing. They claim that like us, the early people were destructive and environmentally insensitive. Then they cite examples. The idea of the "noble savage" is a racial stereotype which never existed, they point out.

It is my belief that every population is made up of a variety of people with interests unique to each of them. You wouldn’t talk to a warrior about medicine plants. His topic is probably strength. He is sensitive to how the landscape can protect his people. His information about the environment is reliant on someone else. Like ourselves, the Native American world was made up of specialists. A healthy tribal society relies on indiviuality that contributes to the whole.

Even the concept of medicine is broken down into many nonwestern varieties by American Indians. Seminole Alice Micco Snow defines medicine people as those that cure body ills, those that help maintain health and relationships, those preventing soul loss, those who prevent or treat mysterious mental ailments.

For some American Indians, medicine is divided into female and male. Only males may practice male medicine while only women work with females. Some Native Americans study the medicine of keeping the environment healthy, keeping the spirit healthy, keeping plants healthy, keeping the ground healthy, and keeping the animals healthy.

In the mountains and deep forests of Columbia, the Tayrona people talk about the force of creation, or se, the spiritual core of all existence, and the aluna, the human thought, soul, and imagination. To them what is important, what has ultimate value, is not what is measured and seen, but what exists in many realms of meanings and connections that lie beneath the tangible realities of the world, connecting all things.

In Tales of a Shaman’s Apprentice by Mark Plotkin, the author describes coming on to a European style garden while traveling with some South American Indians. They look at the field with disdain. They point out that the garden has only a single crop, and worse, there are no weeds. Weeds they tell the author hold the soil in place and shade it from the sun.

In Heart of the Sky, Peter Canby writes about the milpa system of agriculture. The term milpa comes from the native word for corn, but it refers to corn and its friends, beans and squash. Beans put nitrogen into the soil while corn needs nitrogen. The squash draws insects away from the beans and the corn. For the native people, there were relationships between all plants.

Ecologist, James Nations, studying the Lacandons, a Mayan people, discovered a complicated system of planting. "Immediately after burning, the Lacandons protected the soil by planting root crops and fast growing trees. Then they planted their corn. Rather than stopping with the corn, however, the Lacandons proceeded to plant more than eighty different food and fiber crops in a sequence dictated by the flowering of natural species in the forest. In order to reduce the possibility of the spread of plant-specific diseases, these crops, which include beans, sweet potatoes, onions, pineapple, chili peppers, bananas, cotton, and tobacco, were grown in isolated bunches. They were also grown in layers, with plants at different levels above the soil and roots at different levels in the soil, thus creating ecological niches to which each plant was best suited. By the time the field was exhausted, the trees had grown high enough to form what the Lacandons call a pak che kol, a ‘planted tree garden,’ containing cacao, citrus, rubber and other trees, and shrubs; it would not only serve as an orchard but would attract wild animals, thus making the recuperating milpa a source of game until it was ready for cutting and burning again."

Milpa agriculture is based on mimicry. By studying native plants and their habits, the American Indian could be certain of the best qualities the plant could offer.

No, there was never the noble savage. The native people of Florida weren’t "savage." Like us, ome were environmentally sensitive and some were not. Cities and large communities dotted the landscape of Florida in 1491. Trade was important to them. Political intrigue was almost as common as in our world. These were real human beings whose relationship to their landscape was at many different levels. Some probably had an interest in plants. Within their culture, they learned to pass that information from generation to generation through the use artifacts and associated stories.

In the end, what we should learn from our Tocobaga Indian predacessors, is to listen, to look, to adapt, and to love this wonderful landscape.