Belle Glade culture

The literature does however reveal an attempt by Sears and others to distance the Calusa culture from any and all of the earthwork projects in the Lake Okeechobee Basin area.

By 1949 both Gordon Willet and John Goggin authored complete taxonomies and chronologies for the Glades region.

Recently, University of Florida graduate student Nathan Lawres 2015, 2017, 2018), has undertaken research and dating of the Okeechobee region.

Subsequent research will definitively prove or disprove the existence in fact of a separate Belle Glade culture beginning in 1000 BC and who engineered the monumental mound complexes independently.

The area consists of pine and palmetto flatwoods, wet prairies, hammocks of live oak and cabbage palm, and cypress swamps.

The pine and palmetto flatlands of eastern Martin and Palm Beach counties, sometimes called the East Okeechobee area, and the Kissimmee Valley north of Lake Kissimmee to Lake Tohopekaliga may have also been part of the Belle Glade culture, based on the presence of high numbers of Belle Glade type pottery, and in the northern Kissimmee Valley, similar mounds and earthworks.

[9][10] Humans apparently first entered the Lake Okeechobee basin and Kissimmee River valley late in the Archaic period (although there are hints of an earlier, even Paleo-Indian presence).

The more recent Sears chronology divides the Belle Glade culture into four periods; I (1000 BCE – 200 CE), II (200 – c. 700), III (c. 700 – c. 1300) and IV (c. 1300–1700).

Wood, bone, shell and shark tooth artifacts have been found at a few Belle Glade sites, but are too few to be used in defining the culture.

Animals in the diet included deer, turtle, snake, fish and fresh water mollusks.