Archaeologists targeting Mound House

Submitted by vicky on Thursday, 23 October 2003 Page Views: 3078

Removal of the cracked and useless swimming pool at the Mound House on Estero Island in South West Florida, USA, soon might lead to a rare archaeological and educational opportunity. The resulting hole in the 2,000-year-old Indian mound then would be turned into a covered, climate-controlled walk-in archaeological exhibit where visitors will see the history of the mound’s occupation in layers of shell.

But first the state must approve $269,500 for a project proposed by the city of Fort Myers and Florida Gulf Coast University’s Cultural Resources Management Program.

If all goes well, the 45-year-old pool will be pulled out in the autumn of 2004.

“Take out the pool and you have a huge cavity in the mound — what are you going to do, fill it in?” said Corbett Torrence, co-director of the Cultural Resources Management Program. “This is how to make the best out of a bad situation. The hole is a giant earthen history book. Each layer is a chapter in the 2,000-year history.”

Torrence is not new to this kind of thing: In 1991, he did the archaeology for a project at Historic Spanish Point in Osprey that encloses a cut in a 15-foot-tall Indian mound.

Once the pool at the Mound House is removed, archaeologists and volunteers will conduct an excavation to level the area under the pool, which was 8 feet deep at the drain and 4 feet deep in the shallow end.

Much of archaeology is concerned with how artifacts relate to each other in a given activity area — a space where a single activity took place.

A Calusa shell hammer by itself, for example, means little, but a shell hammer close to a pile of whelk shells with holes pounded in them is strong evidence that the activity area was used to prepare food.

By figuring out how different activity areas were laid out in a single structure, archaeologists can make assumptions about a culture’s structure, said Theresa Schober, co-director of the Cultural Resources Management Program and principal author of the grant proposal.

The Mound House pool area is a great place to look for such cultural clues.

Because many archaeological excavations are conducted in 1-meter squares, it’s sometimes difficult to see a big picture — previous 1-meter digs at the Mound House already have shown that the Calusa built homes there.

But the Mound House dig will cover the entire horizontal area of the pool — 40 feet by 20 feet — so archaeologists should get a rare glimpse of daily life.

“Without horizontal excavations, we have limited opportunities to see how they organized their space,” Schober said. “When we do see it, we can start interpreting how the different groups of the society were interacting.

“The organization of space tells us more than this is a house or this is a fire. Information about the size of the social unit could be there. People’s roles in society could be there.”

Archaeologists and visitors to the exhibit also should learn plenty from the vertical area — the walls of the hole.

“The vertical is for time: We’ll see changes in how people occupied the site over the years,” Schober said. “The horizontal gives us one point in time.”

The time in question is from about the birth of Christ until A.D. 800, when the mound was abandoned — the mound, which is small compared to mounds at Mound Key and Pineland, is not really a mound; it’s the southern-most end of a 3,300-foot long ridge that was bulldozed for development.

“The ridge sites here and on Useppa were abandoned at the very time the mounds at Pineland and Mound Key were exploding upwards,” Torrence said. “It might be that the ridges were abandoned because people were moving to urban centers.”

When the project is complete, possibly by the fall of 2006, visitors will walk into the mound from ground level and see the insides of an Indian shell mound measuring 40 feet long and 8 feet high.

All that’s left is to get the money.

The proposal was ranked No. 2 on this year’s Division of Historical Resources Special Category list, which normally would make it a shoo-in.

But last year, the state financed only nine of 55 proposed projects and rolled the others over to this year, so the Estero Mound project is actually No. 48 on this year’s list.

Bill Marquardt, curator in archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, thinks the project is worth financing.

“It’s a terrific project,” he said. “If the grant goes through, it’s a chance to learn about the site and people who lived there. They’ll also have a public exhibit. So everybody wins, not just those of us who do this for a living because the scientists will transmit what they’ve learned to the public.”

Source: News-press.com 23/10/2003

Contributor Bio for vicky: Ex Megalithic Portal Editor, Co-author of 'Rock Around the Peak - Megalithic Monuments of the Peak District' and... More

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