Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe (review)

thetic dimensions of pattern, form, construction, color, and texture, but to consider always "the life experience and feelings ofthe quilter, the act ofcreating the quilt, and the experience ofthe quilt's use." Freeman's book is useful as a compendium illustrating nearly six hundred quilts, and as an exercise in African American portraiture, but in the end it is the superabundance of Freeman's fieldwork that will make this book indispensable for future studies, not only of quilts but of African American domestic history, genealogy, culture, and customs. In these pages we meet 527 quilters and preservers from thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia, and we hear their stories, often in their own words. As he works, Freeman—who is African American himself—finds nearly all of his own stereotypes about African Americans challenged, and he passes that challenge along to us. Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe Byjerald T Milanich University Press of Florida, 1995 304 pp. Cloth, $29.95 Reviewed by Amy Turner Bushneil, associate professor ofhistory at the College ofCharleston and author of two books about Spanish North America: The King's Coffer: The Proprietors ofthe Spanish Florida Treasury, 1¡61-1702 (1981) and Situado andSabana: Spain's SupportSystemfor the Presidio andMission Provinces of Florida (1994). Jerald Milanich, curator of archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History , is the editor or author of twelve books on the early history of Florida, most recendy, three hefty volumes: Hernando de Soto and the Indians of Florida (with Charles Hudson, 1993), Archaeology ofPrecolumbian Florida (1994), summarizing twelve thousand years of human habitation in Florida before the arrival of the Europeans, and the book under review, Florida Indians andthe InvasionfromEurope, which continues the story another three hundred years. Clearly organized and admirably balanced in coverage, the volume offers a much needed synthesis of the growing archaeological literature on Spanish Florida, which, thanks to Milanich and other Florida archaeologists, has been generating more studies than the entire Caribbean, a field to which many ofthe same scholars make a significant contribution . The first two chapters are introductory. Chapter One discusses the documentary and archaeological sources; the second chapter condenses and, for 90 Reviews the nonspecialist, gratifyingly clarifies the information on pre-Columbian archaeology to be found in the companion volume. The rest ofthe book is divided into three parts of three chapters each. In the first section, the author describes the various Florida Indian groups at the time of contact, locating them on the modern landscape and correlating them with earlier cultures wherever archaeological and historical information permits. This is not, however, a work ofreference with "mini-ethnographies," and the reader in pursuit of a particular group will find that it reappears throughout. The second part introduces the Florida explorers, ending with Pedro Menéndez de Aviles and the founding of St. Augustine in 1565. The last section describes the mission system and its destruction in the early 1700s by Creek and Yamasee allies of English Carolina. The epilogue is devoted to the Seminóles, who entered the peninsula just before the European settlers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and were, for them, the Florida Indians. Historians of the early Southeast will find much in this book to appreciate. Milanich's long-standing delight in any item of information, excavated or documentary , that will help him to reconcile space, time, and artifacts here bears fruit in a work of scholarship that is both comprehensive and, for the nonspecialist, happily readable. He has concealed the apparatus of research and suppressed a thousand small historiographical disputes about such subjects as population at the time ofcontact, explorers' routes, and the moveable feast ofmission sites. At the same time, Milanich highlights some of the more interesting current problems , such as efforts to explain the simultaneous appearance of Leon-Jefferson ware in Timucua and Apalachee; attempts to find recognizable markers for such groups as the Utina, Yamasee, and Jororo; and takes revisionary positions on such subjects as the mission setdement systems in Timucua or the attribution of sixteenth-century mistakes of harbor identification. Especially welcome is Milanich's even, fast-paced summary of sixteenth-century events, grounded in geography and generously supported...