Explore Pine Island Sound through new book, lectures

What does mondongo mean? What has drawn inhabitants for a dozen millennia to Pine Island Sound? Why was a lodge — constructed from whelk shells and concrete — built on remote Demere Key? How have sea-level fluctuations impacted these unique island gems?

Released this month, “A Tour of the Islands of Pine Island Sound, Florida: Their Geology, Archaeology, and History” explores the captivating history of 24 islands that have borne witness to thousands of years of human inhabitation and cultural and botanical evolution.

“These islands have an amazing story to tell. Archaeologists and geologists are just now discovering what is here for us to understand,” said author Denége Patterson. This first-of-its-kind book includes“information which has not been readily available to the general public.”

Patterson, a 17-year volunteer veteran at the Randell Research Center on Pineland, is giving a series of talks this Saturday and on Saturday, Feb. 25, at the Research Center’s Calusa Heritage Trail to kick off the book’s launch. Patterson spent three years researching the 160-page, full-color book that was edited by William H. Marquardt, Ph.D., Florida Museum of Natural History archaeology and ethnography curator, and the Research Center’s director.

Marquardt said the book offers an in-depth exploration of this significant gateway of American history, as well as “the role that mangroves and seagrasses play in the health of the estuary, important for fishing and for Lee County’s economy, which is based on attracting people to a healthy environment.”

Patterson has volunteered on excavations, and as a tour guide, lab assistant, boat tour narrator and writer. A retired family therapist, she wrote the book for free, and hired photographer Ron Mayhew, who suspended himself from a helicopter to capture the book’s stunning aerial photographs. The book also features illustrations, maps, historic images, wildlife photos and an extensive index and bibliography.

All proceeds from the $29.95 book benefit the endowment that pays for programming at the nonprofit Randell Research Center, once a major settlement of the indigenous Calusa people. Today, the 70-acre site is run by the Florida Museum of Natural History, though it is mostly funded through memberships, donations and endowment interest. The book is on sale at the Calusa Heritage Trail and will be available soon at local retail outlets.

The stories of the islands

Patterson, a certified Florida Master Naturalist, was amazed to learn that 21 of the 24 featured islands— many preserved and protected by the state—served unique functions. “Each of those islands was treated differently by indigenous people during different eras,” she said, as villages, food-collection sites, tool-making workshops and burial sites. “Some islands were occupied for thousands of years, then abandoned for a few hundred years, and then were occupied again,” she said.

The rich estuarine environment teeming with fish and shellfish that provided the seafood-based Calusa their sustenance was the same draw for successions of others, from Cuban fisherfolk who set up seasonal fish camps to European interlopers to adventurous sailors and pioneers.

Each island has its own story—their location, geology, archeology, historic and modern eras spotlighted in individual chapters. As a result, Patterson notes, “the reader may devour the book in any order they want.”

Readers will learn that a spear tip found on Useppa Island dates to 8000 to 6500 B.C. Cuban fishermen were granted commercial fishing rights in Pine Island Sound by the Calusa as early as 1687. The Seminole were twice promised they would receive Sanibel Island as a reservation. These islands have served as military outposts, fishing resorts, farms, trading posts, major fishing operations, retreats for Native American and black refugees fleeing hostility or slavery, and moonshining and smuggling.

Though the human history is by turns colorful and poignant, Patterson wants to impart the importance of the region’s ecology—its mangrove forests, seagrass meadows, mudflats and tidal dynamics.

“The most important part of the book is Chapter One, which has some astonishing and amazing facts explaining why these islands are so remarkable in doing their job of nurturing, feeding, and creating a plume of life on an unimaginable scale,” she said. “This is a place where the indigenous people were wealthy without having any money.”

If you go

What: Author talks on “A Tour of the Islands of Pine Island Sound, Florida: Their Geology, Archaeology, and History” and sales to benefit the nonprofit Randell Research Center

Where: Calusa Heritage Trail, 13810 Waterfront Drive, Pineland on Pine Island

When: This Saturday and Saturday, Feb. 25, at 9:30 a.m., 11 a.m., and 2 p.m.

Register: Events are free but RSVP to 239-283-2062 or lheffner@ufl.edu