Fort Center's Iconographic Bestiary: A Fresh Look at Fort Center's Zoomorphic Wood Carvings

Author(s): S. Spivey

Year: 2016

Summary

The zoomorphic wood carvings excavated by William Sears from the mortuary pond at the Fort Center (8GL13) site in South Florida are a chronically understudied assemblage. These artifacts are generally interpreted as totems carved into a single contemporaneous dock structure built above the mortuary pond, later excavated in various states of degradation. I propose a preliminary typology through which to interpret their function. Beyond that, I discuss the form the carvings individually take and the figural referents used as guides to shape the carvings, through which I develop a new iconographic interpretation of the bestiary of animals represented in this assemblage.

Cite this Record

Fort Center's Iconographic Bestiary: A Fresh Look at Fort Center's Zoomorphic Wood Carvings. S. Spivey. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Orlando, Florida. 2016 ( tDAR id: 403395)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

min long: -91.274; min lat: 24.847 ; max long: -72.642; max lat: 36.386 ;