With or Without You: Human and Manatee Encounters in Precolonial Florida

Abstract Archaeological zoontologies have tended to focus on animals with whom people of the past were regularly entangled, either in their everyday lives as companion and work animals or at least seasonally as favoured prey. In contrast, I focus on an archaeological case study representing a more ‘eventful’ form of human–animal relations: encounters between Indigenous peoples and manatees ( Trichechus manatus latirostis ) in precolonial Florida, USA. I review archaeological evidence that manatees were uncommon in precolonial Florida, probably only occasionally migrating north from the warmer waters of the Caribbean, thus limiting encounters with people to as little as one or two every few hundred years. I then consider both the potential transformative and stabilizing effects of such infrequent encounters for precolonial Native Americans and—to the extent possible—for manatees. Haraway famously emphasized that ‘becoming is always becoming with’, but for people and manatees in precolonial Florida, becoming may have been becoming with or without .