Fort Center Site, Florida

Abstract

The Untied States of America has a very rich history. The soil has witnessed the rise and fall of many civilizations that has been very important to the cultural and traditional history of the country. Fort Center Complex, Florida is also one of such architectural sites of the country which attracts a considerable interest of archeologist. It is site of a prehistoric village with complex earthworks, which flourished on the banks of Caloosahatchee River near Lake Okeechobee in south Florida, USA. By c. 450 BC the hunter-gatherer occupants had created a 9 m-wide, 350 m-diameter circular ditch to drain a vast garden plot. By c. AD 150 a more complex system of circular and radial ditches enclosed a ceremonial centre with two low, flat-topped mounds. One amazing artifact found within this pond was an elaborately carved wooden platform used for ceremonial cremation. Remains were interred in the adjoining mound. The presence of such historical architectural further enriches the history of our country and has been one of vital places for the tourism.

Fort Center Site, Florida

Site of a prehistoric village with complex earthworks, which flourished on the banks of Caloosahatchee River near Lake Okeechobee in south Florida, USA. By c. 450 BC the hunter-gatherer occupants had created a 9 m-wide, 350 m-diameter circular ditch to drain a vast garden plot. By c. AD 150 a more complex system of circular and radial ditches enclosed a ceremonial centre with two low, flat-topped mounds. On one of the mounds stood a charnel house in which bodies were prepared for placement on a roughly constructed wooden platform, standing in an artificial pond. The upper platform piers were elaborately carved to represent birds and felines. At the collapse of this platform, c. AD 500, many of the 300 burial bundles were salvaged, placed on the former location of the charnel house and covered with a mound of sand. Several of these reburials were accompanied by incised and stamped platform pipes of a style known as Hopewellian, by ornaments carved of Appalachian minerals or by a few ceramic vessels (all Gainesville, U. FL, and Florida Mus. Nat. Hist.) traded from sites related to the Hopewell culture in northern Florida. Nevertheless, the local sand-tempered, plain-surfaced ceramics and the style of the wooden carvings relate Fort Center to several dozen large and complex 'Big Circle' earthwork sites of the non-Hopewellian Belle Glades Tradition, found between the Everglades and sites along the Florida Keys, including KEY MARCO. At the time of European contact in the 16th century this area was occupied by Calusa Indians.

Geographical Location

In the extreme SE of the country, Florida was admitted to the Union in 1845 as the 27th state. It is a low peninsula, 500 mi long, with the Atlantic Ocean on the E and the Gulf of Mexico on the W and the West Indies to the S. To the N are Alabama and Georgia.

In 1513 Juan Ponce de León, a Spanish explorer, seeking the Fountain of Youth, was the first European to land here near the site of St. Augustine. He named the area Florida because it was the flowery Easter season (Pascua florida). Other Spanish explorers followed—Pánfilo de Narváez and Hernando de Soto—and under the last Spain claimed all of what later became ...