Hello I'm Ranger Cicely. I'm standing in front the barn at Kingsley Plantation it is made out of an
oyster shell cement called tabby. The oysters may have been consumed thousands of years ago,
long before European ships reached our shores. The Timucua as they are called now,
were loosely related indigenous people that lived in large villages throughout northeast and central
Florida and southeast Georgia they used forest materials and resources from the salt marsh to
make life here dramatically shaping the land. The Timucua of this area where fish are hunter
gatherers and harvested one of the most abundant and accessible animals around the oyster shells
and other bits of refuge were piled together forming large trash heaps called shell middens
by studying them we learned important details about Timucua culture sometime later the middens
also served as raw materials for enslaved Africans to create structures like this one although the
Timucua are not here to speak for themselves their impacts are long-lasting and provide a record
of life pre-imposed European contact and long before the establishment of Kingsley Plantation.