Terrestrial snails from archaeological sites as proxies for relative sea level on the Gulf Coast of Florida, USA.

Archaeological evidence for local environmental change is obscured by the tendency for humans to remove natural resources from places of procurement and deposit them elsewhere, sometimes at great distance. This is especially problematic for changes in relative sea level, which clearly affected the inhabitability of low-elevation coastal landforms but not necessarily the regional availability of resources of cultural or economic value. Needed are proxies for relative sea level from non-dietary taxa. One genus of terrestrial snails, Truncatella, offers good potential in this respect because of its specific niche at the interface between seawater and land. However, like food resources displaced by people, Truncatella shells are displaced by storms and redistributed landward of the coastline. Distinguishing between autochthonous and allochthonous deposits is essential to inferring relative sea level from the occurrence of this taxon alone. To this end, assemblages of Truncatella shell from stratified sites along the north Gulf Coast of Florida, USA are compared to associated archaeological snails of other taxa and to snail shells from the wrack of proximate foreshores to infer changes in relative sea level over the past four millennia. Variation in the morphology of shorelines and in the accumulation rates of archaeological midden mitigates any direct relationship between terrestrial snail frequencies and sea level, but the results of this study suggest that our approach can be applied to other non-dietary taxa occupying marginally terrestrial niches to refine estimates for sea level derived from the sedimentary records of geological cores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]