Investigating shellfish harvesting and provisioning in Florida’s largest open-water estuary, Tampa Bay, Florida, USA (ca. AD 200–1000)

Landscape modifications produce a myriad of long-lasting ecological and cultural legacies. In some cases, such practices may necessitate the need for proprietorship systems and cooperation among actors and institutions, particularly if these modifications lead to more favorable habitats. In Tampa Bay, Indigenous shell-terraforming generated conditions more suitable for tidal wetland habitats that descendants would have benefited from. We suggest that the recognition of ancestrally engineered landscapes may have been a motivator for negotiating sea tenure systems during public events like mound building. To explore this, we examine variations in mollusk size, species compositions, and oyster geochemistry between domestic and public contexts from five precolonial sites in two sub-basins in the Tampa Bay Estuary to elucidate potential harvesting regulations and tenure systems used in the management of mollusks between ca. AD 200 and 1000. Many of the observed differences in species composition and shell size between public and domestic contexts were minor. Still, dissimilarities in the season and environment of oyster harvests within and between site contexts were stronger and provided insights into shellfishing, site formations, and intra-site variation in ceremonialism that may reflect sea tenure systems. We interpret these patterns as resilient and flexible management institutions that spanned almost a millennium and contributed to sustainable oyster harvests and the persistent occupation of two villages fronting ancestrally generated estuarine sub-basins.