Mortuary Ritual at the Fort Center Mound-Charnel Pond Complex (8GL12): New Insights from an Accidental (Re)Discovery

Summary

William Sears’s reconstruction of a Hopewellian charnel platform with wood carvings at Fort Center (8GL12) is one of the more vivid imaginings of prehistoric ritual in Florida archaeology. This model has been influential in our thinking about ritual in the Okeechobee area. It was long believed that Sears’s excavations completely destroyed the pond-mound complex and that further data recovery would be impossible. Recently, wallowing wild hogs (Sus scrofa) uncovered wood artifacts in the Fort Center mound-charnel pond complex. Salvage excavations revealed that Sears left behind these ancient wood items during his work in the 1960s. These carvings, including wood posts, provided samples for radiometeric dating. Calibrated AMS dates reveal that the wood and the human remains in the pond were deposited during A.D. 600–1000. In light of these new dates and other recent research at the site, a reanalysis of Sears’ excavations shows a dynamic construction history at the mound-charnel pond complex. For over 1500 years, the people of Fort Center reinvented mortuary ritual practices at this location. This model shows the importance of mounds and watery places in designating persistent sacred places on south Florida landscapes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• The Archaeology, Art, and Iconography of Florida’s Watery Landscapes

Keywords

Spatial Coverage