Early New World Monumentality

3. Shell Mounds of the Middle St. Johns Basin, Northeast Florida

3 Shell Mounds of the Middle St. Johns Basin, Northeast Florida Kenneth E. Sassaman and Asa R. Randall Monumentality has many origins across the globe, and multiple causes and conditions surround its various origins. In the southeastern United States, the oldest monuments were constructed at least four millennia before agriculture became important and by populations that were neither large nor sedentary (see Saunders this volume). That foragers in this region of North America built monuments in the absence of food production, permanent settlement, and the institutional leadership usually associated with these other two traits encourages us to consider monumentality on its own terms and not simply as one of several emergent properties of increasing cultural complexity (Bradley 1998; see also Roosevelt this volume). For instance, monumentality can be explained not as a consequence of enabling conditions but rather as a medium of discursive practice that structured the trajectory and pace of culture change. This is the approach we take in explaining the origins of monument construction in northeast Florida. Our ongoing work in the middle St. Johns Basin offers an opportunity to explore how monumentality originated in the context of major structural changes through which relationships between distinct communities and “traditional lands” were creatively reworked. In reconstituting communities under changing environmental and demographic circumstances, monuments were a medium of commemorative practice that enabled people to make reference to the past and to past places of dwelling as they constructed new identities from disparate parts. We preface our exposition with consideration of the conceptual impediments to viewing shell mounds of the St. Johns Basin as anything 54 · Kenneth E. Sassaman and Asa R. Randall other than refuse heaps and provide an alternative framework based on the notion of shell mound construction as historical practice. Changing Perspectives on St. Johns Shell Mounds Shell mounds in the St. Johns River valley numbered in the hundreds before the twentieth century, when most were mined for road fill or fertilizer (Figure 3.1). The few that remain unmolested today are but a faint vestige of the anthropogenic deposits that brought an otherwise flat, wet terrain into sharp relief. Those investigated in the nineteenth century became the chief frame of reference for modern interpretations of their age, function, and structure. Because so many of these early digs uncovered pottery, shell mounds were often registered in modern site files as late-period constructions . But some investigated by C. B. Moore (1999) and Jeffries Wyman (1875) were without pottery, which in the pre-14C world was suggestive (but not definitive) evidence of more ancient origins. We now know that many, perhaps most, of the hundreds of shell mounds in northeast Florida began to take form more than 5,000 years ago, during the Archaic Period, at least 1,000 years before pottery and at least 4,000 years before agriculture. Earthen mounds this old are now widely recognized across the greater Southeast (Saunders this volume), and archaeologists are grappling with the conceptual challenges they pose to deeply entrenched, orthodox thinking (Russo 1994). Some of the oldest mounds in the St. Johns Basin were also constructed from earth (Endonino 2008; Piatek 1994; Sears 1960), evidently for human interment. Other mounds contained dedicated mortuaries constructed of both shell and earth (Aten 1999). In countless other cases, mounds consisted primarily of shell and lack evidence for human burials. Irrespective of inferred functions, because mounds consist of shell from species known to have been consumed by humans and typically contain the inedible remains of other food resources (notably fish bone), investigators since the days of Wyman (1875, 11; see also Moore 1892, 913–914) have generally assumed that shell mounds were the accumulated results of routine, residential practice. Having accepted that shell mounds were composed of primarily subsistence remains, investigators of the modern era turned to ecological factors to explain the origin, duration, and cessation of shell deposition. The development of wetland habitat in the early mid-Holocene has long been considered an enabling factor for intensive settlement of the middle St. Johns region, while the presumed continuity Shell Mounds of the Middle St. Johns Basin, Northeast Florida · 55 Atlantic Ocean 0 40 Kilometers Windover Silver Glen Bluffton Blue Springs Thornhill Lake Harris Creek Hontoon Dead Creek Complex Tomoka Live Oak Mound Orange Mound Groves’ Orange Midden Hontoon Island North Atlantic Ocean Study Area Gulf of Mexico Figure 3.1. Map of the middle St. Johns Basin, showing locations of...