Gathering Relations in an Aqueous World: Monumentality, Ontology, and the Belle Glade Landscape

Summary

Recent research on Pre-Contact South Florida has reinforced the notion that the peoples dwelling in the region inhabited a past material world much different from our own and from neighboring areas. In particular, the hydrologic characteristics of a subtropical landscape centered on the Lake Okeechobee basin are one of the central features of both the epistemology and ontology reflected in the earliest monumental architecture in the region. Yet these worldviews and worlds were not static entities; rather, much like the rising, falling, and continual flowing of their aqueous world, these ontologies were also in motion, gradually expanding in inclusivity. This research suggests that the monumental architecture of the region is a concretization of an ontology. However, both the monumental practices and the ontology it reflects underwent transformations tied to the experiencing of a landscape undergoing its own transformations. Yet within these transformations are visible continuities that reference the past through citational practice.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• The Belle Glade Culture Revisited

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