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Mound seen as a sacred trust

pinellas point Folks are working to preserve the temple site.

By LIBBY NELSON, Times Staff Writer
Published October 7, 2007

More than a thousand years ago, the land across from Victoria Imbach's Pinellas Point home was holy ground.

Once a sacred temple mound, the land became a city park where teenagers gathered for mountain biking, skateboarding, sometimes partying. With every rainstorm, a few more inches of dirt washed away.

Since March, the Greater Pinellas Point Civic Association has been fighting the erosion, trying to restore the mound to what it might have looked like in the seventh century.

"It's a historical site, it was a religious site," Imbach said. "It could have been here for a thousand years. Why just let it go?"

Though many area mounds are shell mounds, or middens, garbage heaps preserved for more than a thousand years, the Pinellas Point mound is a temple mound - built purposefully for sacred or ceremonial reasons, said Richard Estabrook, regional director of the Florida Public Archaeology Network.

Tocobaga Indians could have built the mound as early as the 600s, he said.

Temple mounds often held the homes of a chief priest within the tribe.

"As near as we could tell, they were very important to these peoples," Estabrook said. "We're trying desperately to preserve the site."

The mound was to get county funding to help stop the erosion, but not until 2010. With dirt running into the street each time it rained, the civic association decided the project couldn't wait that long.

Members sought the help of Estabrook and George Garcia, security director for the American Indian Movement's Florida chapter. Working with the city, they planted sod to control erosion, then built a fence to discourage cyclists.

"Any mound in the U.S., or whatever's left of them, we want to protect them or treat them as what they are, very historic sites," Garcia said. "It concerns all of us, whether you're Indian or not Indian."

Imbach became the mound's unofficial guardian, chasing away skateboarders and bicyclists and dragging buckets or a hose across the street to water the sod.

"It's a very historic site," she said. "Who has this when they walk out their front door?"

There are no plans to excavate the mound, Estabrook said. As fencing was installed, he found shells and debris the tribe left behind, but no pottery, stone tools or human remains.

"We want to encourage people to treat this like any other publicly owned property - use it, enjoy it, but don't take things away from it," he said.

The group plans next to build a second fence on the north side of the mound and to replace nonnative plants with native ones.

Eventually, it wants to construct a boardwalk leading to a platform on top of the 30-foot mound to preserve the new plants, said Barbara Hawkins, president of the civic association.

The group's actions should be a model for other communities, said Garcia, who fights for the preservation and restoration of American Indian mounds throughout the state.

"I contact these other municipalities and say, 'Look, this is what my town's doing, don't tell me you can't do it,'" he said. "Don't tell me you don't have at least seven or eight people with a conscience to say, 'This is desecration. Let's fix it.'"

Libby Nelson can be reached at lnelson@sptimes.com or 727 893-8779.

[Last modified October 6, 2007, 20:53:34]