Mission Cemeteries, Mission Peoples: Historical and Evolutionary Dimensions of Intracemetary Bioarchaeolgy in Spanish Florida

Notes

Notes Introduction: Historical and Evolutionary Dimensions of Bioarchaeological Research 1. In retrospect, the sampling design for Timucua province was comparatively poor, and for this reason the Timucua data receive more limited treatment in the literature. Chapter 1. Life and Death in Spanish Colonial Florida 1. Meaning “conquest of souls.” According to Whitehead (1992, 139), 1652 marks the official date when the Spanish Crown ended the conquista a fuego y sangre in favor of the conquista de almas. However, as early as 1566, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés commented, “it is wasted time to think that the Holy Gospel can be established in this land with the army alone” (Menéndez to a Jesuit friend, in Bennett 1968, 157). 2. Actually, priests were a common constituent of the earliest sixteenth-century entradas . The first Franciscans to arrive in Florida were with the Narváez expedition, and one Franciscan, two Dominicans, and one Trinitarian accompanied de Soto (Geiger 1937, 32–33). 3. Gannon (1965) points out that the architecture of the Florida churches, which featured simple construction with clay floors, pine supports, thatched roofs, and wattleand -daub walls, are indications of the poverty of the Florida colony. 4. Although I am not a student of French colonialism in North America, the establishment of St. Augustine does seem to have stalled France’s interest in the southern United States for nearly a century. However, the threat from France never completely subsided. Examples of French-instigated attacks on Spanish holdings in Florida include the 1682 and 1684 attacks on the La Chua cattle ranch in the Florida interior (Bushnell 1978a, 428–29), pirate activity near the mouth of the St. Marks in 1677, and an attack on the fort built at St. Marks in 1682. La Salle’s attempt to establish a Gulf Coast colony in 1685 caused Spain to look beyond Apalachee province in their political affairs (Leonard 1936, 547). Hann (1988, 323) discusses the Apalachee mission that was sent to locate and attack the French in the Mississippi Valley in 1686. France established posts at Biloxi, Mobile, and New Orleans between 1699 and 1718, all of which were direct affronts to Spain’s control of the region. 5. Not all Christian Indians traveled to Cuba. Gold (1970) discusses the emigration of about 100 Yamassee and Apalachee Indians to Veracruz, Mexico, noting that the mortality rate on the voyage alone was 50 percent. 264 · Notes to Page 20 6. The boundaries of Apalachee are relatively well defined. The territory stretched from the Aucilla River in the east to the Ochlockonee River in the west and was bounded to the south by the Gulf of Mexico. Its northern extent was roughly approximated by the modern-day Florida-Georgia state line. The geographical extent of the Guale chiefdom has been the subject of lengthy debate. They were adapted to the coastal environment, and their territory likely did not extend more than 20–40 miles inland (Saunders 2000a; Worth 2004a). The Altamaha River formed the southern boundary of the Guale polity, a fact that is reinforced by the distribution of Irene phase ceramics (Saunders 2000a, b, 2009). The northern boundary of the Guale chiefdom is more difficult to define. Worth (2004a) proposes the Ogeechee River, but this is not universally agreed upon. The issue is whether the chiefdoms of the Port Royal area (Orista and Escamaçu) were included in the Guale paramount chiefdom. Jones (1978, 1980) suggests that they were, whereas Worth (2004a) disagrees. Bushnell (1994) pushed the northern Guale boundary to Edisto Island, while Hann (1987) places the northern boundary at the Savannah River, thus excluding the Port Royal chiefdoms but pushing the boundary north of the Ogeechee. 7. Although they were fairly monolithic, both chiefdoms apparently had internal political divisions. For example, Hann (1988, 100) notes there may have been an east and west primary village in Apalachee: Ivitachuco and Anhaica. The former housed the peace chief and the latter housed the war chief (who may have been related to each other). Interestingly, de Soto had primary dealings with Anhaica, while the peace negotiation that Fray Martín Prieto arranged in 1608 took place at Ivitachuco. These primary villages seem to have anchored the distribution of settlements in the province, but their full significance is not known. The Guale also had internal political divisions. Jones (1978) proposed three subchiefdoms in Guale (Espogache-Tupiqui, Guale-Tolomato, and Asao-Talaxe), and Worth (2004a) modified and expanded this list into five or perhaps six subchiefdoms...