Shell Mound

February 2024                                                   Most Recent Posts:
Cedar Key RV Park                                           Hiking In and Near Cedar Key
Sumner, Florida                                                 Cedar Key – the Island Town

The Lower Suwanee National Wildlife Refuge (all the green on the map below) is a big land area around Cedar Key.  Shell Mound is one part of it.  When David and I visited on one of our early winters in Florida, we stayed in the tiny county campground with perhaps a dozen sites and were awakened early in the morning by the deafening sound of air boats going out just at dawn from the boat launch there.

You can see the Shell Mound area in the lower section of the NWR map below.  Both that time and this time I visited and hiked Shell Mound several times. 

The town of Cedar Key is on the far island at the bottom of the map.  The darker red road line on the far right is the only road leading to it.

You can see here that the Shell Mound is a semi circular ridge of shell and earth that was originally constructed on the arm of an ancient U shaped sand dune.  It lies at the end of a peninsula  a short distance above Cedar Key.  The road you drive in on is part of that ancient dune.  

The county park and campground are in yellow at the top of the map and in easy walking distance of the mound trail and the mound park and kayak launch which were both sadly closed for this visit due to hurricane damage.

But the two trails luckily were open.  I talked about the Dennis Creek trail in my previous post.

The Laboratory of Southeastern Archeology has been doing site work at Shell Mound since 2012 and with sophisticated equipment provided this 3 D image of what they feel the area looked like between 400 and 650 CE

The site features mounds of marine shell (predominately oyster) measuring about 23 feet high surrounding a large central plaza. Excavations by archaeologists from the University of Florida have discovered the remains of large feasts that took place in the summer–likely celebrating the Summer Solstice–the longest day of the year.

This map below shows the walking trail and the numbered information signs which are extremely well done.  In all the maps, you can see that Shell Mound resembles an amphitheater.

Mother Nature has taken the mound area back, with her tree cover and it isn’t really possible to “see” the mound from ground level.  When you hike you do  know you are going up.  There has been some desiccation of the mound by fill removal.  At this point it is 23 feet high.  But imagine building even 23’ of earth and shell.

The information signs tell that the mound is composed of about 1.2 billion oyster shells.   From them I also learned that pits were dug into the dune to cook large quantities of food presumably for ceremonial feasts.  The pits then became refuse bins containing oyster shells and bones from  fish, especially mullet, birds and sea turtles.  Apparently fragments of 15 gallon cooking pots were found.

This is the bulldozer trench dug into the south ridge of the mound in the 1970’s by a private landowner not long before the mound became public land and was protected.  So sad that it appears someone wanted to get in just under the wire and make money.  The shell of many mounds in Florida was taken for road aggregate, fertilizer and building material.

You can see shell  on the trails up the mound and on its sides.

The original view from the top enabled you to look down into the amphitheater and opposite out to the gulf.  There are only  only small views to the gulf available today.

The closest island off the coast of Shell Mound is Hog Island where there was a burial mound named Palmetto Mound by archeologists.  It has been completely destroyed.  I have no idea what happened to the bodies of the ancestors.

The signs say that perhaps before Shell Mound was constructed rising seas had separated Hog Island from the dune arm.  Or perhaps the water divide between the living and the dead was symbolic.  So much has been destroyed that a lot is guess work.    Look closely at the time line.  It is very interesting that Shell Mound was abandoned long before burials ceased at Palmetto Mound.

It is so sad that none of this was protected in the early part of the 20th century.

In this photograph you can see the relative placement of the two mounds.

A view out to Hog Island.

History prior to Shell Mound.

The current trail near the top of Shell Mound looks very different from when the Native Peoples were creating the mound.

Archaeologists refer to places such as this as “civic-ceremonial centers,” locations of both residence and ritual activity.

It is an easy trail and a wonderful place to visit and reflect.