Learn about the pre-Columbian Indians who lived on Sanibel at a talk by Dr. Arlene Fradkin of Florida Atlantic University on Saturday, July 11 at 2 p.m. at the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum on Sanibel. The talk is presented by the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum and the Southwest Florida Archaeological Society (SWFAS). Reservations are not required and the cost is $7 admission to the museum.

First occupied around 500 B.C., the Wightman site had become a year-round settlement by about 500 A.D., which is when construction of the large mounds began. Like almost all the smaller mound sites ringing Pine Island Sound, it was abandoned around 700 A.D. The original residents of the Wightman site could have been ancestors to the Calusa Indians, who dominated south Florida when the Spanish arrived in the early 1500s.

The Wightman site was studied in the 1970s and again, briefly in the mid-1990s. Fradkin, then a graduate student at the University of Florida in Gainesville, worked with UF’s Dr. Jerald Milanich, and she used her work on the site as the subject of her Master’s thesis. Now an associate professor in anthropology, Fradkin has worked on archaeological digs in the Everglades and the Atlantic as well as the Gulf coasts. All that remains of the Wightman site today is a low hill; the mounds were demolished for a housing development.

The Shell Museum’s “Calusa: The Original Shell People” exhibit incorporates some of the artifacts found at the Wightman site. The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum is located at 3075 Sanibel-Captiva Road on Sanibel. For information about the Museum, please call 239/395-2233. For more information on the Wightman site lecture, please call Karen Nelson at 239/292-7858.