Woodland-period mound building as historical tradition: Dating the mounds and monuments at Crystal River (8CI1)

Indigenous oyster fisheries persisted for millennia and should inform future management

“…Much of the data generated in this study come from oyster-bearing shell middens, archaeological sites with accumulations of shell, animal bone, plant remains, and other artifacts. Shell middens have often been described by archaeologists as domestic refuse deposits, but shell middens are complex, engineered spaces that range from small, sometimes seasonal sites to massive, intricately designed mounds and rings, often with deeply symbolic and ritual meaning for Indigenous peoples in the past and present 19 – 21 . The millennial-scale records we present here document resilient ecosystem dynamics between people and oysters, even under conditions of intensive harvest.…”

Stratigraphic Framework, Paleoenvironments, and Indigenous Terraforming of Inshore Estuarine Subbasins in Tampa Bay, Florida, U.S.A.

“…As elsewhere in the region, Native peoples of Tampa Bay estuary developed early common-era settlements atop landforms that were occupied centuries to millennia earlier by ancestral peoples. Stratigraphic sequences composing platform mounds at Cockroach Key and Harbor Key contain much older shell midden sediments, recording the mining of ancestral cultural shellwork deposits for use as mound fill, an Indigenous terraforming practice observed at several Gulf Coast shell mound sites (Austin, Mitchem, and Weisman, 2014; Luer, 2007:40; Pluckhahn and Thompson, 2017:79; Randall and Sassaman, 2017; Schwadron, 2017:50; Thompson et al ., 2016).…”

“…The mound contains a limited volume of unconsolidated clean shell and was built predominately from in situ and repurposed shell midden, separated by thin fire/habitation features. As at Cockroach Key and other Gulf Coast shell mounds Pluckhahn and Thompson, 2017;Randall and Sassaman, 2017;Schwadron, 2017;Thompson et al, 2016), inverted radiocarbon sequences suggest that mound building involved the mining of antecedent cultural deposits for use as mound fill. Nevertheless, internal consistency among dates within the stratigraphic sequence suggests that mound building was relatively rapid (spanning a ca.…”

How Many Dates Do I Need?

“…It has been demonstrated that OSL dates, with their long age estimations and potentially unreliable results, can significantly affect models produced using primarily radiocarbon data (Su et al 2020). Alternatively, OSL dates may increase the fit of model expectations and a radiocarbon dataset as an independently derived temporal estimation (e.g., Pluckhahn and Thompson 2017).…”