Geoglyphs and the Creation of an Andean Coastal Landscape    

Wintergarden Presbyterian Church, Port Charlotte, 6:30 PM

Andean peoples constructed some of the most sophisticated landscapes of the ancient world.  Manifest as figural and linear geoglyphs, ephemeral structures, and terraced platforms, the earth’s surface was transformed into vast theatres for public performance. Structured rock formations, or geoglyphs, challenge questions of scale and in how the landscape was perceived, used and translated.  This talk traces the development of these forms from the earliest in the Casma Valley to those of the Paracas peoples in south-central Peru.  We will see how these systematically designed pathways -- nearly invisible to the untrained eye – accommodated pilgrimage and framed elaborate building complexes. Timing of processional activity was guided by astronomical phenomena. Sites that marked solstices and equinoxes are shown to be integral to the formation of a sacred geography. 

 Charles Stanish (Ph.D., Chicago) is Executive Director of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Culture and the Environment at the University of South Florida.  He has served as director of the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, and curator/chair of the Anthropology Department of the Chicago Field Museum. His extensive research in Peru, Bolivia, and Chile addresses the roles that trade, war, ritual, and  

  In 1934 archaeologist from the Smithsonian excavated mound and midden sites as part of the federal Works Project Administration. Many of these excavations were around Charlotte Harbor and Tampa Bay. It was the most coordinated and productive period for archaeological findings and research in Florida’s history. In almost all locations, no further research was done and the records forgotten. All the sites and their contents fit into prior knowledge of the Late Archaic and the Early Woodland Periods except one. The mysterious burial mound on Lemon Bay referred to as the Englewood Mound. The archaeologists of the time and to the present passed over two important findings that did not fit with the surrounding cultures, nor on the Florida peninsula. First, the ceramics found only there were so distinctive and of such finer quality, they were named Englewood and Lemon Bay. Second when they dug down to the primary burial, the burials were coved by a thick layer of red ochre. Ehmann concluded therefore that the people who built the burial mound on Lemon Bay were a distinctive and not a local culture at all. The presentation is about his journey to discover who were those mysterious people and where did they originate.

Think you know about the Calusa? Think again. Now a book that is written for the general reader about an ancient civilization that lived around the Charlotte Harbor for 25 centuries.

Author and founder of the Charlotte Harbor Anthropological Society Ted Ehmann investigated the mound building societies in the Ohio and Mississippi River Valleys for twenty-five years before moving to Port Charlotte. Despite his extensive knowledge of these ancient people, he had heard never heard of mound builders far away in south Florida. Upon moving to Port Charlotte, he set out to find out what he could. What he discovered is the basis for his book. Written for the general reader, Ehmann tells the story of a highly evolved people who successfully adapted to southwestern Gulf coastal environment, Immigrants from Louisiana around 800 BC, the Calusa engaged with the people already settled here. The result was a highly expressive culture that built monumental shell mound complexes, canals and even entire islands. Ehmann also shares how the view of these people have been misunderstood by Florida researchers, and how their conclusions fail to capture what was really the most " important and significant hunter-gathering society in world history."

The  People of the Great Circle, Prehistoric Mound Builders In South Florida, December, 2019, Pineapple Press, a division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishing  ISBN 97816833405 22 Available through booksellers everywhere