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Abstract We present new chronologies that inform the timing and tempo of shell ring and shell mound construction on the South Atlantic Bight. Our project combines recently acquired dates with legacy radiocarbon dates from over 25 rings and mounds to provide a higher-resolution chronology regarding the occupation and formation of this larger landscape of the earliest fishing villages along the East Coast of the United States. We resolve the ordering and timing of occupation of these rings and mounds through Bayesian statistical modeling. These new models historicize and contextualize these shell rings in ways previously impossible. Specifically, our new chronologies of these villages indicate that the earliest villages were established prior to the invention of pottery. The early period of village establishment evidences isolated village rings, whereas later periods seem to have more villages, but these appear to have been relocated to other areas and/or islands over time. Shell mounds are fewer in number, are spread throughout the time period, and may represent special purpose sites compared to shell-rings. Once villages spread, they quickly adopted new technologies (i.e., pottery) and created new institutions and practiced village relocation, which allowed this way of life to persist for more than a thousand years. 

Applying a coastal-geoarchaeological approach, we synthesize stratigraphic, sedimentological, mollusk-zooarchaeological, and radiometric datasets from recent excavations and sediment coring at Harbor Key (8MA15)—a shell-terraformed Native mound complex within Tampa Bay, on the central peninsular Gulf Coast of Florida. We significantly revise the chronological understanding of the site and place it among the relatively few early civic-ceremonial centers in the region. Analyses of submound contexts revealed that the early first millennium mound center was constructed atop a platform of sand and ex situ cultural shell deposits that were reworked during ancient storm landfalls around 2000 BP. We situate Harbor Key within a seascape-scale stratigraphic and paleoenvironmental framework and show that the shellworks comprise an artificial barrier protecting the leeward estuary basin (and productive inshore wetlands) from high-energy conditions of the open bay and swells from the Gulf of Mexico. The sedimentary and archaeological records attest to the long-term history of morphodynamic interaction between coastal processes and Indigenous shell terraforming in the region and suggest that early first millennium mound building in Tampa Bay was tied to the recognition and reuse of antecedent shellworks and the persistent management of encompassing cultural seascapes. 

In 1948, John W. Griffin and Ripley P. Bullen conducted two weeks of excavations at the Safety Harbor site (8PI2) on Old Tampa Bay, the type site for the period and culture of the same name. Although they published a summary of these excavations (Griffin and Bullen 1950), many details were not included; for example, the report includes no plan drawings and artifacts are tabulated only in aggregate (by excavation block, rather than by square). Fortunately, the Florida Museum of Natural History curates relatively detailed notes and drawings of the excavations. We use GIS to review these for new insights, particularly regarding domestic architecture—a facet of Safety Harbor material culture that has remained particularly elusive. 

Ethnographers have ably documented the great extent and diversity of social institutions that contemporary fishers and shellfishers employ to collectively manage common property resources. However, the collective action regimes developed among ancient maritime societies remain understudied by archaeologists. We summarize research into the development and form of collective action among the maritime societies of the western peninsular coast of Florida, USA, drawing on our own recent work in the Tampa Bay area and previous work elsewhere in the region, especially the Calusa area to the south. Archaeological evidence suggests that collective action became more important in Tampa Bay in the first centuries CE, probably owing to a marine transgression that resulted in more productive estuaries. Groups here staked claims to productive estuarine locations through the founding of villages, the building of mounds, and the construction of relatively simple marine enclosures. Historically, these changes resulted in societies of relatively small scale and limited authoritarian government. In contrast, collective action developed later in the Calusa area, may have begun in relation to resource scarcity than plenty, and may been founded in kinship rather than in public ritual. Collective action in the Calusa area resulted in projects of greater scale and complexity, providing a foundation for more hierarchical and authoritarian social formations.