Florida’s Safety Harbor mounds were built between 800-1450 A.D., often on top of Weeden Island mounds raised three or four centuries earlier. By 1100, a chain of grass-covered mounds, made of earth and oyster shells, watched over the waters from Crystal River to Weeki Wachee Springs to Anclote Key to Hillsborough Bay to the Alafia River to Bullfrog Creek to Maximo Park to Philippe Park. Some were middens, some topped by the chief’s house, some crowned by the house of the dead. Others were temples, places where the human and the sacred meet. The society which made the mounds is gone, wiped out by European diseases or European swords.
“We forget the mounds were once the center of a vibrant society.”
In Florida, the past makes us uncomfortable. The past is inconvenient. We build hotels and strip malls and retirement villages on what we choose to see as empty land; we impose on the marshes and beaches and mangrove swamps cities fancifully called “Treasure Island,” “Bayshore Beautiful,” or “Holiday,” congratulating ourselves on our optimism, our modernity, our impermanence. We assume pre-Ponce de Leon Florida was mere wilderness, outside of history, until European eyes feasted upon it. But that’s our ignorance. The peninsula has been inhabited for 14,000 years. At the turn of the first millennium A.D., over 100,000 people lived here, speaking a variety of languages, organized in various social structures with sophisticated art forms and complex religious systems. Florida is old—as old as Lascaux, as old as the Pyramid of Djoser, as old as Stonehenge.
By 1163, when French master masons began laying stone for the cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, the Tocobaga temple mound on the west shore of Old Tampa Bay had been standing for a century. Three hundred miles to the north, the Apalachee were raising six great mounds on the shore of what we now call Lake Jackson. The Apalachee technically belong to Mississippian Culture, but their mounds were built around the same time as the Safety Harbor ones and look pretty similar. The house I grew up in sits about a mile as the crow flies from these mounds. My brother and I—amateur archeologists of the worst kind—would dig in our back yard and find arrow heads, spear points, and pottery shards in the red clay. We felt connected to the mounds, though our ancestors came down to Florida in Andrew Jackson’s bloody wake, killing or running off the last of the people who made them. We’d sit atop the tallest mound listening to spring peepers croaking and the wind on the lake. When this land was part of a cotton plantation in the 1850s, the owner called it “the Mound of Dreams.”
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It’s almost impossible to avoid romanticizing the mounds. Having made them rare with our zeal for destruction, then (belatedly) declaring them precious, we somehow need to see ancient people and ancient places as possessed of lost wisdom. There are those who believe the Tocobaga mounds protect Tampa Bay from hurricanes, a legend proved untrue by Helene and other storms. We forget the mounds were once the center of a vibrant society. When the Apalachee lived in North Florida and the Tocobaga on Tampa Bay, the mounds would not have been so reverentially quiet. These were towns, humming with commerce, craft, cooking, sport and ritual.
Most of the mounds are now confined in parks with some anodyne historic marker off to the side. It’s as if a cathedral had been stripped of its statues and stained glass windows and fenced off: an impressive monument but devoid of meaning. Still, the beauty and mystery of the mounds draws me. Any place where people have planted their crops and birthed their babies and buried their dead for hundreds and hundreds of years, resonates with the deep past. Most days our modern senses can’t detect them, but if we take care to look around, we can see the old behind the new, and hear the ghosts speaking to us from 10 centuries ago.
Diane Roberts is Professor of English and University Alumni Distinguished Writer at Florida State University. She is the author of “Dream State: Eight Generations of Swamp Lawyers, Conquistadors, Confederate Daughters, Banana Republicans,” and her most recent book is “Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America.” Since 1993, Roberts has been a commentator for National Public Radio.
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This article appears in Apr 17-23, 2025.