Archaeological research on interactions between Native Americans and manatees prior to colonization

Scholars who study the ancient ancestors of Native Americans sometimes use the tools of science to shed light on life before colonization. This archaeologist offers evidence to show that Native Americans rarely hunted manatees in precolonial Florida.

There is a common assumption that manatees may have been more common in Florida before human predation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, only a few studies have considered evidence for pre-modern manatee populations. Cumbaa, based on a review of archaeological evidence, concluded that precolonial sea-cow populations were low and that Indigenous exploitation of manatees was ‘negligible’. O’Shea, drawing from Cumbaa and a review of historical sources, agreed that manatees had probably never been ‘extremely abundant’ in Florida, but suggested this was due to hunting pressure from both Indigenous peoples and later, colonial-era settlers.

Pluckhahn and Thulman recently completed a more comprehensive review of historical baselines for the Florida manatee based on archaeological and archival sources.… In sum, for the more than 13,000 years of Indigenous precolonial occupation of Florida, Pluckhahn and Thulman were able to confidently identify only four manatee specimens from three precolonial archaeological sites; claims of manatee bones at three additional sites cannot be verified. This paucity is striking, considering the evidence for manatee exploitation by precolonial Indigenous peoples elsewhere in the circum-Caribbean.

Were this scarcity limited to the precolonial era, one might consider the possibility that the Indigenous peoples avoided killing or consuming manatees or perhaps took special precautions with the disposal of the remains of butchered sea cows. However, Pluckhahn and Thulman also noted that manatees were not mentioned in historical accounts of Florida prior to the late 1700s, and only sparingly in the century that followed. Manatees are also not represented in faunal assemblages associated with colonial-era Spanish and British settlements in Florida, although they are reported for similar contexts in the circum-Caribbean.

Comparison with the archaeological occurrence of several other animal species bolsters the interpretation that manatees were uncommon in Florida prior to the modern era. For example, faunal remains of Delphinidae spp. (dolphins and pilot whales) have been identified at more than 35 precolonial or early historic sites, despite being much more difficult to hunt than manatees. Faunal remains of the Florida panther (Puma concolor cougar) have been identified from at least 15 sites, despite its nocturnal and elusive behaviour. The occurrence of manatee specimens is more consistent with those of two animal taxa which were likely only occasional visitors to Florida or had very limited numbers and range before going extinct in the 1800s: the Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis), a flightless bird restricted mainly to the Northern Atlantic (identified at five sites) and the Caribbean Monk Seal (Monachus tropicalis), probably limited mainly to the Caribbean and extreme southern Florida (represented on six or seven sites).

One possibility is that manatees were not present at all in precolonial Florida and these few archaeological specimens represent material acquired through trade with Indigenous peoples elsewhere in the Caribbean. The fact that the better-documented specimens from precolonial archaeological contexts in Florida were fashioned into tools or ornaments may support this conjecture. Pluckhahn and Thulman note that the form of the ‘paddle-shaped implement’ from the Belle Glade site resembles vomiting spatulas made of manatee bone from Taino sites in the Caribbean. However, claims for direct connections between Florida and the Antilles based on artifact similarities have been rightly criticized for lack of rigour.

Alternatively, manatees—either living or dead—may infrequently have washed ashore in Florida as they were displaced northward by strong winds and currents. Historically, manatee carcasses occasionally washed ashore in areas of northern Florida, attracting attention from residents who were unaccustomed to seeing them. In the recent past, living manatees have been found up the Atlantic Coast as far as Rhode Island and up the Mississippi River as far as Tennessee, although they eventually succumb to cold stress at such northern latitudes.

More likely, manatees only occasionally extended their range north from the Caribbean to the Florida peninsula, owing to their susceptibility to cold stress and the episodic cooling associated with the Little Ice Age that began in the 1200s and continued to the 1800s. Isotope studies of corals, ostracods and planktonic foraminifera suggest sea surface temperatures in the Caribbean were 2–3 C° cooler at times during this interval and sixteenth-century Spanish colonial accounts of Florida describe freezes that would be considered anomalous today. The manatee’s expansion in numbers and range over the last century are probably owing to natural and anthropogenic climate change, the creation of warm-water refugia such as power plants, and changing human attitudes.

Assuming the latter hypothesis is correct, current archaeological evidence suggests encounters between manatees and people in the precolonial era were extremely rare—perhaps only once every one or two millennia. Granting the fragmentary nature of the archaeological record, as well as sampling biases, we might imagine that such encounters were slightly more common—perhaps of the order of once every few centuries. Even at this rate, however, human and manatee encounters must have been unexpected.

Thomas J. Pluckhahn, “With or Without You: Human and Manatee Encounters in Precolonial Florida,” Cambridge Archaeological Journal (2026), 1-10.