An Archaeology of Commercial Shell Site Destruction in Northeast Florida

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Shell miners reduced or removed shell-bearing sites across Florida in the 19th and 20th centuries. Archaeologists often work around this destruction to reconstruct how ancient landscapes emerged and were experienced in the deep past. In this poster, I focus on how these ancient places of social significance were destroyed, and outline an archaeology of shell site extraction through a case study from the St. Johns River valley. There, scores of shell mounds, representing hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of shell and other materials, were destroyed and their contents dispersed for use as construction aggregate and fertilizer. Using precision GNSS and LiDAR I identify and quantify features resulting from mining remaining in impacted landscapes. Using archival documentation, I explore build out a picture of the legal and practical processes that enabled the extraction, identify locations that received the mined material, and consider the social and economic factors that supported the extraction industry.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 52718