Asa R. Randall – författare

Given its pivotal location between the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, its numerous islands, its abundant flora and fauna, and its subtropical climate, Florida has long been ideal for human habitation. Yet Florida traditionally has been considered peripheral in the study of ancient cultures in North America, despite what it can reveal about social and climate change. The essays in this book resoundingly argue that Florida is in fact a crucial hub of archaeological inquiry.

New Histories of Pre-Columbian Florida represents the next wave of southeastern archaeology. Contributors use new data to challenge well-worn models of environmental determinism and localized social contact. Indeed, this volume makes a case for considerable interaction and exchange among Native Floridians and the greater Southeastern United States as seen by the variety of objects of distant origin and mound-building traditions that incorporated extraregional concepts. Themes of monumentality, human alterations of landscapes, the natural environment, ritual and mortuary practices, and coastal adaptations demonstrate the diversity, empirical richness, and broader anthropological significance of Florida’s aboriginal past.

Large accumulations of ancient shells on coastlines and riverbanks were long considered the result of garbage disposal during repeated food gatherings by early inhabitants of the southeastern United States. In this volume, Asa R. Randall presents the first new theoretical framework for examining such middens since Ripley Bullen’s seminal work sixty years ago. He convincingly posits that these ancient “garbage dumps” were actually burial mounds, ceremonial gathering places, and often habitation spaces central to the histories and social geography of the hunter-gatherer societies who built them.

Synthesizing more than 150 years of shell mound investigations and modern remote sensing data, Randall rejects the long-standing ecological interpretation and redefines these sites as socially significant monuments that reveal previously unknown complexities about the hunter-gatherer societies of the Mount Taylor period (ca. 7400–4600 cal. B.P.). Affected by climate change and increased scales of social interaction, the region’s inhabitants modified the landscape in surprising and meaningful ways. This pioneering volume presents an alternate history from which emerge rich details about the daily activities, ceremonies, and burial rituals of the archaic St. Johns River cultures.