By Tamara Jager Stewart
This is an article excerpt from the Fall 2020 edition of American Archaeology Magazine. Become a member of The Archaeological Conservancy for your complimentary subscription.
The Calusa king Caalus, perched high on his throne in his grand house, watched as Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the first governor of La Florida, arrived with his entourage. According to Spanish accounts it was 1566 and, hoping to impress Caalus, who ruled what is now south Florida, Menéndez had assembled five hundred men, including some two hundred soldiers, as well as trumpeters, drummers, fifes, and even a gifted singing and dancing dwarf. They arrived in seven vessels and climbed to the peak of Mound Key, a thirty foot high, human-made island of shells and sand, to greet the king.
Mound Key was thought to be the seat of the powerful Calusa kingdom, and recent archaeological research there has confirmed it was in fact the capital and also revealed the extent of ancient landscape alteration, monumental construction, and engineering ingenuity that allowed the Calusa’s population to grow to an estimated 20,000 without reliance on agriculture. Indeed, given the results of recent research, they are now considered one of the most politically complex groups of non-agriculturalists in the ancient world.
“The Calusa have long fascinated archaeologists because they were a fisher-gatherer-hunter society that attained unusual social complexity,” said William Marquardt, curator emeritus of South Florida Archaeology and Ethnography at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Marquardt and Victor Thompson of the University of Georgia are co-directing research at Mound Key, which has a complex arrangement of shell midden mounds, canals, watercourts, and other features. “For me, the work has been absolutely fantastic, and since we began it has been one discovery after another,” said Thompson.
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