2025 Winter Solstice Talk Transcript

Below is a transcript of the talk given at the 2025 Winter Solstice event at Shell Mound by Lukas Desjardins.

    Good afternoon everyone. For those of you who may not know me, I’m Lukas Desjardins. I’m a master’s student at UF doing research on Shell Mound and other sites in this area. I hope everyone has enjoyed this winter solstice here at Shell Mound. As many of you know, this is our first solstice event back at Shell Mound in quite some time, and thanks to the refuge we can once again enjoy this newly repaired dock where we get a beautiful view of the gulf. In fact, this is my first time that I’ve actually been at Shell Mound for a solstice event. I’m sure some of you might be missing the drinks from the tiki bar, but I’m at least glad that we are now able to bring this event back to Shell Mound. I hope that everyone also enjoyed the tour. For some of you, this may have been your first time at Shell Mound, and others have been here more than me, but either way I hope that you learned something new.

    The first thing I want to talk about is, at a really fundamental level, why I think that archaeology is important, and why local archaeology is particularly important for the world right now. At a basic level, archaeology is the study of the lives and history of past people through the physical traces that they leave behind. In many cases, these are intentional marks that people have left on the earth - like Shell Mound, which stands as a monument to the lives of people who once lived on this coast. And this is really what drew me to archaeology. While we of course can’t talk to those who are long gone, they can still leave us clues about how they once lived - we can learn about what it means to be human and what it was like to live in particular places at particular times. This includes how things have changed. Of course, there is what we have built - this dock that we now stand on, the roads, and the signage - but there is also the natural processes that have occurred over the long term. Looking out on the water, we can see these mangroves that now cover the coastline that probably wouldn’t have been here in the past. At the same time, though, one value of archaeology is the perspective it gives you about how little certain things have changed. How close the past really is to us, in ways that are physical and observable. That’s why we are here, at Shell Mound, gathering on the solstice today. 1500 years ago, people came to this same place to gather, and in doing so they created a monument to their lives that has persisted into ours. Places like Shell Mound make the past feel less distant and less alien to us. 

    Working in archaeology is something that gives a feeling of intimacy with the past like nothing else. I’m sure Dr. Sassaman could have described, in elegant detail, the exact angles of the sun that we are watching set tonight. But, at least for me, knowing that the sun we are now watching set over the horizon is the same sun once watched by people here 1500 years ago creates a connection across vast stretches of time. Those people also stood in this place, watching the sun set, probably enjoying some delicious winter oysters. For them, the solstice was likely a time of new beginnings - the end of a period of renewal for the sun as the days now reached their shortest duration, and the sun now reverses the journey it has made since the summer solstice. And while today, those of us assembled here tonight excluded, our societies don’t generally make much out of the solstice, the winter remains a time of new beginnings - the end of a cycle and beginning of a new one. 

    So, this is really why I think that local archaeology in the current world is so important. It is not just how we learn about the past, but it puts people into the past - it humanizes the past. It helps us to understand that there were people here who came before us. I think this is particularly true for a place like Shell Mound. I’m glad that my mom was able to come here tonight, all the way from Orlando. She would be able to tell you about the anxiety I experienced as a kid after learning about climate change and sea level rise in school. This has always been something, in the back of my mind, that worries me. But archaeology is one of the few things that gives me hope, and through the past I think we can see other possibilities about the future.

    Places like Shell Mound, and the archaeological story of the refuge in general, can help to show that what we’re experiencing in the present - sea level rise, extreme weather, devastating hurricanes - are things that people on the coast have always lived with, and are things that people have always adapted to. When people first came to Florida, as many of you may know, the shoreline would have been many many miles west of here, and we’d be standing near the middle of the state now. It was rapid sea level rise during the early to mid Holocene that enabled estuarine systems on our coasts to form, along with habitats for oysters and all manner of fish. In many cases, during tumultuous times, people would have lived through rapid sea level rise occurring over only a handful of generations. Memories of their own ancestors' experiences with sea level rise would have provided valuable knowledge for how to live in their own present. The laboratory of southeastern archaeology at UF has documented many of these experiences with sea level rise through archaeology. This tells a story of the resiliency of both human and natural systems, operating together, which are able to persist through time. Knowing that what we are going through now is, at least in some respect, the same as what people have gone through in the past, gives me some comfort and it also gives me hope. 

    Shell Mound is a monument to resilient, sustainable coastal life. Something that Dr. Sassaman has been focusing on, in his research further inland at Lake Pithlachocco, is the idea of the generational knowledge that comes with living long term in particular places. For those of us who are not indigenous, we haven’t lived here very long in the grand scheme of things - even those of us who might be in a long line spanning many generations of Floridians. For indigenous people on Florida’s coasts, deeper roots and longer histories would have also brought knowledge of the kinds of low frequency and high magnitude that we are now unfortunately experiencing with much greater frequency - kinds of events that normally only occur every few lifetimes. These are things like sea level rise, extreme hurricanes, and extreme flooding. This generational knowledge is a kind of practical knowledge through which people can plan for the long-term. This answers really fundamental and human questions, about where it is safe to live, where it is safe to build, where it is safe to bury the dead. 

    The people who once lived here, at Shell Mound, lived through a tumultuous time, seeing several transitions in global climate over only a few generations, and the durability of Shell Mound is a testament to this practical knowledge. This durability, though, has unfortunately come into question in recent years. You all have unfortunately seen the damage that recent hurricanes have brought to the site. This is what my master’s research is about, planning once more for the future of Shell Mound and understanding how the site has become vulnerable. I won’t get too much into the technical details, but one important takeaway I’ve found is that it is places where modern people have changed Shell Mound that it is the most vulnerable. This is along the roads, and along where shell mining previously occurred. Changing the original surface of the mound has created areas with unstable surfaces that are liable to collapse during hurricanes. We don’t yet have clear ideas about what can be done about this, and whether Shell Mound can be saved, but at the very least knowing what makes the site vulnerable will give us tools to plan for the future.

    However, I don’t just want to talk about the vulnerability of Shell Mound, but the resiliency as well. This isn’t just resiliency for the site itself, but a kind of resiliency that contributes to the maintenance of coastal ecosystems. Shell Mound is a place that continues to provide upland habitat on the coast that wouldn’t otherwise be here. The shells with which it was constructed changes the soil chemistry here in a way that supports unique biodiversity, providing habitat for the red cedar trees that grow here. Shell Mound can also help protect the coasts from erosion. It acts as its own living shoreline along with the natural systems surrounding it. As sea levels rise, the relief that Shell Mound provides will help to mitigate the problem of wetland migration that would otherwise lead to the loss of important wetlands. What this points to is the immense value of places like Shell Mound that goes beyond their value for research or recreation. Shell Mound is not just important to us as people, but it is important to all the plants and animals who make use of it.

    I think that one of the most important contributions of archaeology to ecology is understanding the relationship between human and natural systems, really understanding how people can shape the natural environment in ways that are not based on domination but on co-creation. All of the shell sites on Florida’s coasts are evidence for this kind of relationship. And as we know from Shell Mound, this relationship is not limited to the land - we now have evidence for the ways that people nurtured the oyster reefs out at sea, once again planning for the long-term resiliency of crucial ecosystems. The amount of loss that has occurred on these coastal sites is a tragedy, and we will never know the full extent to which indigenous people were responsible for shaping Florida’s gulf coast. But at least here in the refuge many of the elevated places that lie on the coast are only there because people in the past built them. And if I might make a brief detour to the everglades for a moment, we see a similar phenomena there where human action was critical for the development of tree islands that remain a crucial part of the everglades to this day. What this really does is it tells us a different story, of the relationship between people and our environments, that contrasts with a lot of modern narratives that see environmental destruction as part of our human nature. This is what I really mean when I say that the past can tell us about different possibilities for the future. Things haven’t always been the way they are now, and things can be different in the future. 
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    I had the pleasure this past semester of teaching Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic to an undergraduate class. I wanted to bring up his definition of the land ethic:

“The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”

    Both Shell Mound, and the staff here at the refuge give us excellent examples of this kind of Land Ethic. Like nothing else in our country, the Refuge system is exemplary of a kind of stewardship that takes unique knowledge and skill. Again, this is practical knowledge, and I’m sure the staff and especially John Stark here could tell you that it isn’t something you just learn in school. It is something you learn by doing. 

     I’m hoping to be able to continue my research at Shell Mound, not only as it relates to the present and planning for the future, but to also expand on our understanding of the past in a way that can contribute to this kind of planning. This involves not just looking at Shell Mound in isolation, but how it relates to the rest of the landscape surrounding it. Out across the water, some of you may know about Palmetto Mound, the cemetery that was likely one reason that people began their celebrations of the solstice here. This was a landscape that was marked in relation to time, to the ancestors, and to the cosmos. As we saw from the tour, the natural landscape itself is oriented towards the solstices. But the power of Shell Mound was distributed across this landscape. Recently a paper came out about Richard’s Island, where a fish trap you all may have heard of was identified a few years ago. There is also Komar, south of here, another complex of mounds that we know very little about that will hopefully be subject to more research in the future. It is possible that this is the place that people went to after Shell Mound was abandoned, as falling sea levels during the Vandal Minimum reconnected Shell Mound and Palmetto Mound.

    What Shell Mound did, though, during its heyday was bring these places together, through the solstices, gathering people and materials from places all along the coast. People materialized their relationships across time and space within these mounds. And I’m happy to see, once again, Shell Mound is gathering people together on the solstice. I would like to thank all of you for coming, and for listening to my talk. Seeing people who care about this place, who are stewards of the land, is something that gives me hope for my own future.