Key Marco

Key Marco was an archaeological site (8CR48) consisting of a large shell works island next to Marco Island, Florida. A small pond on Key Marco, now known as the "Court of the Pile Dwellers," (8CR49) was excavated in 1896 by the Smithsonian Institution's Pepper-Hearst Expedition, led by Frank Hamilton Cushing. Cushing recovered more than 1,000 wooden artifacts from the pond, the largest number of wooden artifacts from any prehistoric archaeological site in the eastern United States. These artifacts are described as some of the finest prehistoric Native American art in North America. The Key Marco materials are principally divided between the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania; the Department of Anthropology, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; and the Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida. The original pond was completely excavated and refilled. It is now covered by a housing subdivision. Excavations of small parts of the site were also conducted in 1965 and 1995.

The island of Key Marco was composed of shell mounds and other shell works and separate from Marco Island in the 19th century. A late 19th century settlement on the island was called Marco Village. The Olde Marco Inn on the north end of the island was founded in 1887. The name of the settlement on the island was changed to Collier City in 1927. By late in the 20th century Key Marco had been attached to Marco Island and all of the mounds on Key Marco had been leveled and built on. The area is now known as Old Marco Village. One source of confusion in the name is Marion Gilliland's use of "Key Marco" to refer to all of Marco Island. Another source of confusion arises from the fact that in the 1980s a development company renamed the former Horr's Island as "Key Marco". Horr's Island was the location of an independently significant archaeological site. It has one of the oldest indigenous burial mounds of the eastern United States, dating to about 1450 BCE; and it was the site of the largest, permanently occupied community of the Archaic period (8000 BCE- 1000 BCE) in the southeastern part of the nation.

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