ABSTRACT
Archaeologists in the United States are trained as anthropologists whose discipline focuses on a holistic view of culture. Archaeologists are interested in learning how, why, when, and under what circumstances people produced tools or ornaments and carried out activities associated with them. They also want to know how the tools and activities fit into the total functioning of the culture and what prompted them to change through time. The broad geographic distribution, the diverse environmental situations, and the great time span of the artifacts recovered from Florida's archaeological wet sites suggest that a great wealth of wooden artifacts and other botanical specimens may still be undiscovered. With the recovery of this heritage comes a major responsibility to preserve it for the future. The usually perishable organic materials from wet sites provide the only broad opportunity to discover relationships between resources available and resources utilized by prehistoric groups of people.
