21 Facts About Fort Center

Fort Center is an archaeological site in Glades County, Florida, United States, a few miles northwest of Lake Okeechobee.

Much of the area around Fort Center was developed as improved pasture during the 20th century.

Fort Center is in the Lake Okeechobee Basin, an area that surrounds and drains into Lake Okeechobee, and is synonymous with the Belle Glade culture area, one of several related culture areas in southern Florida.

McGoun quotes Stephen Hale as saying that complexes "with sequences of construction and architectural style almost identical to those at Fort Center" are found from Lake Tohopekaliga in the north to Palm Beach and Hendry counties to the south.

Fort Center site came to the attention of archaeologists after a carved wooden bird was found in the pond in 1926.

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In 2010 further research at the Fort Center site was conducted by Victor D Thompson and Thomas J Pluckhahn with grants from the National Geographic Society, Ohio State University and the University of South Florida.

Fort Center cited the use of celts and adzes made from conch-shells, the proposed derivation of the Timucuan language from South American roots, the cultivation of maize, and the use of earthworks to form fields in savannahs as was done in South America.

Fort Center cited the use of fiber-tempered pottery, similar to that used in South American, and distinct from pottery used in the rest of eastern North America.

Fort Center is the first to argue that the alterity of Belle Glade monumental landscapes provides a context to an ontological approach.

Part of this levee, named Midden B, was used as a living site during Period I While the mounds at Fort Center were mostly used as house platforms, some mounds and other earthworks served other purposes.

Sears states that the circles at Fort Center were earlier than those of the Adena culture of the Ohio River valley.

Sears believes that the Fort Center circles are related to circles at Hopewellian sites.

Sears believes that the inhabitants of Fort Center, who dug the circular ditches and introduced maize and cord-tempered pottery to the area, were people who were descended from migrants from South America, but they had been resident in Florida long enough to have adapted to the local environment.

Indirect evidence for cultivation of maize at Fort Center includes the fields enclosed by circular ditches created during Period I, and the linear earthworks of Period IV, which Sears compares to the circles and ridges used for agriculture on tropical savannahs in pre-Columbian South America.

Later reanalysis of samples from Fort Center confirmed the presence of maize pollen long before maize is known to have appeared elsewhere in Florida.

The soil at Fort Center has low fertility, high acidity, and high levels of aluminum, and thus is not suited for growing maize.

An analysis of dental wear indicates that the Period II residents of Fort Center did not depend on horticulture for their diet, and any use of maize did not contribute significantly to their diet.

Fort Center, who was killed in the Battle of Lake Okeechobee during the Second Seminole War.

Fort Center was one of several strategic forts for supplies for the war effort around Lake Okeechobee.

Fort Center had been abandoned by then, and the expedition had to repair the palisade when they occupied it for a few days.

Fort Center was reactivated during the Third Seminole War as a station on a military road from Fort Myers to Fort Jupiter, with part of the route using canoes to cross Lake Okeechobee.