When archeologists from the University of West Florida announced they’d discovered the long-lost remains of Spanish explorer Don Tristan de Luna’s 1559 settlement and shipwrecks, only one question sprang to Cathy Parker’s lips: What were those weary explorers eating?
Parker, who works with the UWF Archeology Institute, is a “faunal analyst,” which is a fancy way of saying that she spends a lot of time digging through ancient trash-heaps.
This work, which has been her focus for the last quarter century, is aimed at giving researchers a clearer view of what our earliest European ancestors here in the New World ate…