Summer Solstice 2025: Save the Date

Friends of Lower Suwannee and Cedar Keys NWRs invite one-and-all to celebrate Summer Solstice with us on Saturday, June 21st at the Tiki Bar in Cedar Key. We will gather, meet, and greet at 5:00. Friends’ member Dr. Ken Sassaman, the Hyatt and Cici Brown Professor of Florida Archaeology at the University of Florida, will speak about Summer Solstice at Shell Mound. 

Winter Solstice Celebration 2024

Shell Mound is a portal into another world.

​The solstices are special to Friends because they were important to the indigenous people who lived at Shell Mound as well as those who gather here from afar at Summer Solstice. How is Shell Mound connected with Summer Solstice? It is located on the remnants of a large U-shaped dune. On the Summer Solstice, the sun rises over the closed end of the dune and at Winter Solstice it sets between the arms of the open end of the dune.

The UF Laboratory of Southeastern Archaeology describes it this way:

Shell Mound is located on a parabolic dune that is oriented to the solstices. This is actually a common feature of Ice Age dunes in the study area, and it resulted from prevailing winds blowing from the southwest to the northeast at about 60 degrees east of north, the azimuth of the summer solstice rise.

This of course is happenstance, but the orientation of dunes up to 2 km long were no doubt noticed by people so attuned to the cyclical movements of celestial bodies. Like the periglacial fissures of bedrock beneath Stonehenge or the erosional rift that is Chaco Canyon, natural features of the landscape with celestial orientations were often valorized by indigenous people as places where the sky and earth intersected.

Such places are sometimes considered portals to other realms of existence or places where ancestral beings or forces reside. In this respect, it is hardly coincidental that denizens of the Lower Suwannee region emplaced their deceased on the distal ends of parabolic dune arms stretching towards the opposite of the summer solstice rise, which is the direction of the winter solstice set, 240 degrees east of north.

​We suspect that at the time it was established no later than 2,700 years ago, Palmetto Mound, located across 500 m of intertidal water to the west of Shell Mound, was at the end of a dune arm. It follows that Shell Mound was probably sited in relation to Palmetto Mound although its connection to summer solstice feasts is uncertain. 

(extracted from a longer explanation to be read at: 
https://lsa.anthro.ufl.edu/projects/lower-suwannee-archaeological-survey/shell-mound-summer-solstice-feasts/)