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Mound-Summit Practices At Cockroach Key (8hi2) Through The Lens Of Practice Theory, Chandler O. Burchfield

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Cockroach Key (100-1000 CE) has one of the tallest platform mounds (Mound A) in Tampa Bay and all of prehistoric Florida; however, little is known about what the surface was used for. This research uses a forward-looking approach (following the ideas of Pauketat and Kassabaum) of interpreting mound-summit practices to avoid pre-Mississippian platform mound misconceptions of surfaces serving primarily as elite residences. Recent GPR investigations on the mound-summit revealed a circular pattern of anomalies hypothesized as a structure. These results are tested by the sampling of artifacts from a small diameter auger (18 auger samples) and elemental distributions based on …