Late Prehistoric Florida: Archaeology at the Edge of the Mississippian World

10. Fort Walton Culture in the Apalachicola Valley, Northwest Florida

10 Fort Walton Culture in the Apalachicola Valley, Northwest Florida Nancy Marie White, Jeffrey P. Du Vernay, and Amber J. Yuellig Fort Walton is the Mississippian variant in northwest Florida–south Alabama–southwest Georgia, defined 60 years ago by Gordon Willey (1949a), and characterized by agricultural villages, temple mounds, and Mississippian forms of ceramics that are, however, not shell tempered like most other Mississippian pottery, as well as other distinguishing elements. This chapter expands on our current knowledge and interpretation of Fort Walton in the Apalachicola–lower Chattahoochee Valley region with some new information (Marrinan and White 2007). Fort Walton societies were indeed complex, ranked, possibly stratified chiefdoms (to use a convenient, though ambiguous and debatable term) participating in the wider Mississippian world. But they had a traditional and distinctive material culture that mostly evolved in place and may reflect some degree of isolation or maintenance of some ethnic or geographic identity. Geography, Sites, and Types of Evidence The Apalachicola River forms at the confluence of the Chattahoochee and Flint rivers and flows some 177 km (110 river or navigation miles) south to the Gulf of Mexico. The only Florida river with snowmelt, the Apalachicola is the lowest part of the great Chattahoochee basin, which originates 870 km inland in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Chattahoochee-Flint confluence marks the border between Georgia, on the east bank, and Florida, on the west bank of the Chattahoochee for its lowest 25 river miles (figure 10.1). Above that the river marks the Alabama-Georgia border, and Fort Walton culture extends about another 40 km upstream. This rich environment had abundant resources and fertile alluvial bottomland good for ◀◆◆◆▶ Figure 10.1. Map of Fort Walton sites, including those with Lamar components, in the Apalachicola/lower Chattahoochee Valley. Fort Walton Culture in the Apalachicola Valley, Northwest Florida · 233 agriculture. The lower delta is low-lying and swampy but full of aquatic resources that made for a different (nonagricultural) late prehistoric adaptation . The same is true for the coast, sheltered by white-sand barrier islands and shallow bays with abundant fish, crustaceans, and shellfish. Fort Walton sites range from small probable farmsteads to large villages with temple mounds in typical Mississippian layout (Lewis and Stout 1998; Lewis et al. 1998; Payne 2002). On the coast and lowest part of the delta, sites are usually shell middens. Mounds are interestingly distributed and enigmatic (detailed in Marrinan and White 2007: table 1); figure 10.2 shows them schematically. It is still unclear how contemporaneous or sequential they are. The Apalachicola Valley proper has four known temple (platform) mound centers (Moore 1902, 1903): Pierce (8Fr14) on the west bank at the river mouth, Yon (8Li2) and Cayson (8Ca2) in the middle valley on opposite sides of the river, and Chattahoochee Landing (8Gd4) at the upper, east side right below the confluence. Across the river from Chattahoochee Landing, the Curlee site (8Ja7, now washed away) was probably a riverbank cemetery, not a mound (White 1982). A platform mound of possible Woodland origin with later Fort Walton burials and expansion (near another , conical probable Woodland mound) is Waddell’s Mill Pond (8Ja65) in the upper drainage of the Chipola River, the biggest tributary of the Apalachicola (Tesar 2006; Tesar and Jones 2009). A conical burial mound with a Fort Walton (and a Middle Woodland) component was Chipola Cutoff (8Gu5, now washed away), near the upper confluence of the Apalachicola and Chipola rivers (Moore 1903; White 2011). Two mounds along the lower Chattahoochee are Old Rambo (9Se15) on the east bank in Georgia, possibly conical, tentatively assigned to Fort Walton (Moore 1907: 437; White 1981); and Seaborn (or Mound below Columbia or Omussee Creek mound, 1Ho27), a platform mound at the northernmost extent of Fort Walton culture, 240 km (150 navigation miles) upstream from the Gulf on the west bank in Alabama (Belovich et al. 1982; Blitz and Lorenz 2006; Moore 1907: 444–46). A possible additional Fort Walton mound (with Middle Woodland materials) at the now-drowned mouth of the Flint River was the Underwater Indian Mound (9Se27; White 1981). None of these mound centers has had enough research to permit the kind of interpretation possible for better-known Mississippian sites elsewhere in the Southeast . However, recent field, archival, and collections work has produced interesting new data and insights. Figure 10.2. Schematic map of Fort Walton mound sites in the Apalachicola/lower Chattahoochee Valley. Fort Walton...