• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

Pioneer in Space and Time: John Mann Goggin and the Development of Florida Archaeology

Posted on: Thursday, 24 February 2005, 03:00 CST

Pioneer in Space and Time: John Mann Goggin and the Development of Florida Archaeology. By Brent Richard Weisman. Foreword by Jerald T. Milanich. The Ripley P. Bullen Series, Florida Museum of Natural History. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2002. Pp. xxii, 176. $49.95, ISBN 0-8130-2573-7.)

What would be the focus and path of archaeology today if John Mann Goggin had lived more than his short forty-seven years? This is a question that hovers throughout Brent Richard Weisman's book. The question itself implies Goggin's guiding role in the development of archaeology in the Southeast, and the monograph is haunted by a sense of what might have been.

Goggin's "first love," the cultural and natural history of the Everglades, fueled his curiosity (p. 73). When he began his work in the 1930s, the field of Florida archaeology was "as wide open as the land itself (p. 29). By the time he completed his 1948 doctoral dissertation, the concept of cultural tradition held Goggin's imagination and became his fundamental organizing principle. His immersion in historical archaeology tempered his submersion in the world of millennia past and allowed him to connect living tradition to archaeological cultures. The central problem he addressed was the relationship between culture and geography. John Goggin saw Florida's cultural past as a unique expression of patterns evident in southeastern prehistory. He asserted that techniques and influences flowed southward across the mainland, not northward from the Antilles, an idea that countered the wisdom of the time.

In the 1940s Goggin produced three works that were "almost solely responsible" for the birth of Florida archaeology: his 1948 Yale dissertation, "Culture and Geography in Florida Prehistory"; his Space and Time Perspective in Northern St. Johns Archeology, Florida (New Haven, 1952); and his two-volume unpublished study "Archeology of the Glades Area, Southern Florida" (p. 75). Weisman judges this last work to be "the most remarkable work in Florida archaeology [that] like no other expresses the passion and genius of its author" (p. 76).

Goggin instituted the first underwater archaeology program in the United States, turning the salvage of submerged sites from treasure diving into a discipline. He established the anthropology department at the University of Florida and became an "academic kingpin" (p. 118). The department is his greatest and most enduring legacy.

Weisman asserts that Goggin laid the groundwork for later archaeologists to see Florida as a part of Latin America and Europe. Archaeologists' Atlanticworld perspective is "largely Goggin's doing" (p. 125). Weisman reminds his readers that Goggin's work influenced archaeology everywhere and that "those workers who rarely think beyond the next test pit are living in a world created in part by John Goggin" (p. 151). Weisman's book is often a paean to John Goggin but strikes a lyrical balance between scholarship and admiration, with a bit of wistfulness, too. Weisman's Goggin is a frail genius.

Florida Division of Historical Resources SUSAN R. PARKER

Copyright Southern Historical Association Feb 2005

Source: Journal of Southern History, The

More News in this Category