Hunting and gathering societies are generally not associated with the construction of monumental architecture, particularly in a world consisting only of other hunting and gathering groups. Yet within the St. Johns River Valley of Florida, and the southeastern United States in general, hunter-gatherers were constructing monuments beginning in the Middle Archaic period, at about 6000 cal. B.P. Previous work on these monuments focused largely on demonstrating their antiquity early-on. Currently the debate centers on the level of socio-cultural complexity that they signal or its absence despite their existence. To date none of the Archaic monuments of the greater southeastern United States have been demonstrated to have been constructed for burial of the dead and only those from the St. Johns River Valley and northeast Atlantic coast of Florida provide clear evidence of their mortuary function. Although their existence has been demonstrated, there has been very little work at mortuary monument sites until the research carried out for this study.

The goal of this research is ultimately to understand the conditions under which mortuary monuments were erected in the St. Johns River Valley and northeast coastal Florida. Toward this end, baseline data from an Archaic period mortuary monument site, the Thornhill Lake Complex, was collected through a program of topographic mapping and excavation within major site features as well as an analysis of collections data and primary research documents from the late nineteenth century. The result of this work is a picture of mortuary monument construction during the late Mount Taylor, Thornhill Lake Phase (5600-4500 cal. B.P.) that arose out of previous ritual practice, that of constructing monuments of shell. The later mortuary monuments are constructions primarily of earth. This transformation occurred within a context of an increasingly populated and socially diverse landscape. Memory creation and maintenance through the construction of these monuments and the attending rituals (and their re-enactment) was the process through which identity at varying scales was asserted and negotiated.