The Impersistence of Persistent Places on the St. Johns River, Florida

Summary

"Persistent places"—natural or terraformed locations that draw repeated human action—are unique resources for archaeologists investigating deep-time phenomena. Not only do they allow us to track social and ecological changes anchored in space, the repeated tending to such places set in motion historical path dependencies for descendent communities. However, at the human scale persistence is never a taken for granted, but is produced by the projects of communities who incorporate places into daily, commemorative, and cosmological frameworks. Because places are multi-temporal and relational, they persist in their being enmeshed in associations between persons, ecologies, places, and historical narratives; the linkages between which are subject to transformations as communities attend to present concerns and try to assure futures. The hard work of keeping places from becoming impersistent is immanent in the genealogies of terraformed landscapes of the middle St. Johns River in northeast Florida. There, over the course of nine millennia, hunter-gatherer communities manipulated old places and created new locations for daily living and cosmological reverence. Using depositional histories at shell mounds throughout the region, I track attempts by communities to maintain or recreate continuities in the face of landscape-scale threats from sea level change and attendant ecological transformations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20604