Remapping histories: Archaic period community construction along the Middle St. Johns River, Florida

This study examines the significance of hunter-gatherer built landscapes through an analysis of Mount Taylor period (ca. 7300–4600 cal B.P.) shell mounds along the Middle St. Johns River in northeast Florida. Mount Taylor communities are best known for the incipient exploitation of shellfish and other aquatic resources in the region. In Florida and elsewhere, shell mounds are routinely interpreted as refuse accumulations, while their repeated occupation is taken to represent long-term continuities enabled by abundant wetland resources. Through a historiography of local research, I show that this model of shell mound growth reflects widely held anthropological assumptions regarding hunter-gatherer social simplicity and stasis, and obscures evidence for change through time. I develop an alternative framework based on practice theory to detail how shell mounds and associated places emerged as a historical process in which communities inscribed and politicized social memories through the deposition of shellfish and other materials within landscapes.;In order to problematize the contexts of shell mound inhabitation, I examine the paleohydrology of the Middle St. Johns River. I also consider the evidence for continuities in subsistence, settlement, exchange relationships, and mortuary traditions throughout the Mount Taylor period. The social and ecological contexts provide a spatial and chronological framework for examining how Mount Taylor communities inhabited places. Because most shell mounds were destroyed by twentieth century land-use practices, I use historic observations and modern remote sensing data to develop a geospatial database detailing the location and organization of Mount Taylor places. The results of topographic and stratigraphic testing of non-mounded shell sites are also reported. This analysis details how Mount Taylor communities established and renewed settlements as witnessed in small-scale depositional practices. Finally, I reconstruct the histories of six Mount Taylor shell mounds based on stratigraphic testing.;The results demonstrate that shellfishing was initiated at a time of considerable landscape instability by arguably diverse regional populations. After being established as places to dwell, some preexisting settlements were reconfigured as platform mounds upon which shellfish was deposited in ritualized sequences, while others were converted into foundations for mortuary mounds. Through time, other shell mounds experienced complex histories of abandonment, renewal, and transformation as well. I argue that along the St. Johns, Mount Taylor communities routinely referenced past places in order to construct new social histories that accommodated or denied social and ecological change.