In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

13 Ritual at the Mill Cove Complex Realms beyond the River Keith Ashley and Vicki Rolland Copper plates, long-nosed god earpieces, and spatulate celts are not often thought of as the material possessions of foragers, particularly ones living at the edge of the early Mississippian world. But in northeastern Florida, St. Johns II (AD 900–1250) fisher-hunter-gatherers acquired appreciable quantities of stone, metal, and other mineral artifacts from far-off lands. The majority of these nonlocal items appear to have been consumed at the community level through mortuary ritual at two ceremonial centers: Mill Cove Complex and Mt. Royal. What is rarely mentioned, however, is the fact that these St. Johns II societies also interred artifacts from much earlier periods of manufacture in these same mortuary mounds. Early Mississippi period inhabitants of Mill Cove were fully aware of the antiquity of these objects and their associated mounds and middens. We propose herein that their acquisition , use, and burial in St. Johns II mounds helped forge a connection to a deep and sacred past. In this chapter we explore the use of exotica and pieces of the ancient past as a fundamental part of St. Johns mortuary ritual from the vantage point of Kinzey’s Knoll at the Mill Cove Complex. The Mythical Past Evidence of past cultures is present everywhere across the landscape, and throughout time and place societies have been guided in the present by their past (Lowenthal 1985; Gosden and Lock 1998, 2). As a product of human action, culture is incontrovertibly historical in that it is continually negotiated and passed down from generation to generation. Because of the ongoing process of its construction, culture is not reproduced in its exact form, although human actions are certainly constrained by the structural context from which they derive. In fact, it is history that bestows the structural possibilities for human agency or any action that can Ritual at the Mill Cove Complex: Realms beyond the River 263 conceivably run contrary to the norms, practices, and rules of society. Thus, all human action builds upon what came before. In this chapter, we are concerned more with the deep past, a time that existed beyond the lifetime or memory of any one person in a society. Memory allows us to recall stored information and bring it forth into the present . It works at both individual and group scales, which means that a vast array of memories can coexist in any given community. Here, our interest centers on social memory or “a collective notion . . . about the way things were in the past” (Van Dyke and Alcock 2003, 2). Memories are not static or fixed reflections of the past; theirmeaningsarecontinuallysubjecttonegotiation, contestation, and redefinition (Lowenthal 1985, 210; Wilson 2010, 3). As the gap between the past and present widens, the past is reconstituted using whatever evidence is available. In Florida, material clues of primordial times would have existed in the form of mounds, middens ,anddurableartifactsaswellasnaturallandscapefeaturessuchasrivers,creeks, and distinct landforms. With this in mind, a distinction can be made between genealogical history and mythical history, although the two are not necessarily mutuallyexclusive .Intheformer,thepastisconstructedthroughtiestoknownancestors, whereas in the latter deeper descent lines and “a less well-known past is evoked” (Gosden and Lock 1998, 3). A mythical history constitutes a peoples’ notion of what happened before the known past. In Native American societies, history is recounted through kinship rendering and the repeated oral telling of stories and events associated with those individuals. Thememoryofthelivingisrecreatedthroughvariousphysicaland verbalmnemonicsthatservetorestatethepastandkeepthememoryalivewithinasociety (Gosden and Lock 1998, 3). Social memory is retrieved through a variety of means such as song, story, dance, and art, and it is often collectively embodied in the landscape, in architecture, and in portable objects. But what about the ancient past, the long ago that has faded from everyone’s memory? This is a past that is open to interpretation; it is a mythical history that is constructed to serve the needs of those in the present . As Lowenthal (1985, 210) states, “the prime function of memory . . . is not to preserve the past but to adapt it so as to enrich and manipulate the present.” In the following we explore how St. Johns II societies of northeastern Florida may have used mortuary ritual and “pieces of the past” to authenticate what they perceived as tangible connections to mythical ancestors. Mill Cove Complex The Mill Cove Complex is the largest early St. Johns II settlement in northeastern Florida. Mapped onto rolling relict dune fields along the south bank of the...

Share