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About a century ago, archaeologists excavating pottery fragments around Tampa Bay encountered something puzzling. Some of the pieces carried decorations that looked strikingly similar to pottery found hundreds of miles farther north. On appearance alone, the fragments seemed connected to the Mississippian culture, which emerged more than 1,000 years ago and reshaped social, economic and political life across much of southeastern North America. For decades, however, maps of the Mississippian world generally left out peninsular Florida. The Tampa Bay pottery suggested that the region's relationship with that culture may have been more complicated. "It's been this open debate for a century," said Neill Wallis, curator of Florida archaeology, bioarchaeology and the Ceramic Technology Laboratory at the Florida Museum of Natural