Maize at the margins of Mississippian: macrobotanical and radiocarbon evidence for precolonial corn at the Safety Harbor site (8PI2), Florida

We report the recovery of maize (Zea mays) from precolonial contexts at the Safety Harbor site (8PI2), in Tampa Bay, Florida—the type site for the late prehistoric ceramic series, period, and material culture complex of the same name. The discovery contributes to recent and relatively dramatic shifts in our understanding of temporal and spatial limits of Indigenous corn cultivation in the eastern United States. It is also significant for our understanding of the eponymous material culture complex, which has generally been excluded from the taxonomic category “Mississippian” despite the presence of many of the defining traits. The apparent efforts by Safety Harbor peoples to cultivate small amounts of corn in spite of the limitations imposed by the biogeography of the Florida peninsula is another indication that they were endeavoring to construct their own version of a Mississippian identity, whether or not archaeologists choose to include them in this “taxonomic box.”