Measuring Ancient Reuse of the Past: Archaic and Woodland Landscape Histories of the St. Johns River Valley, Florida

Summary

The middle St. Johns River valley in northeast Florida was occupied more-or-less continuously beginning at least 9000 years ago. Regional inhabitation by hunter-gatherers involved extensive terraforming of the landscape, including the construction of earthen and shell mounds, in addition to many non-mounded places. Many locations were repeatedly occupied over the millennia, with successive generations modifying or otherwise interacting with existing, often ancient, places. Earlier research took these patterns as evidence for continuity in subsistence and settlement traditions. In this poster, we critically examine the trajectories of site reoccupation regionally in order to identify the context and conditions promoting site reuse through time. We compile site histories of mounded and non-mounded locations, drawing on nineteenth-century observations, twentieth-century salvage excavations, modern surveys, and aerial remote sensing including LiDAR and historic imagery. Our analysis identifies several pathways, including the maintenance of residential spaces and conversion to sacred space, that are tied to broader trends in environmental history, settlement, politics, and cosmology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21306