Late Prehistoric Florida: Archaeology at the Edge of the Mississippian World

7. An Overview of the Suwannee Valley Culture

7 An Overview of the Suwannee Valley Culture John E. Worth During the Mississippi period the interior riverine region of northern Florida was characterized by an archaeological culture that, by almost any measure, seems to have lacked any of the more obvious and visible trappings of the otherwise widespread Mississippian cultural phenomenon, including platform mounds, Mississippian iconography, and unequivocal evidence for intensive maize cultivation. This northern Florida culture, now known as Suwannee Valley, was so indistinctive from the standpoint of material culture and public architecture that it remained virtually unrecognized by archaeologists for decades, sandwiched neatly between the more well-known Weeden Island and Leon-Jefferson cultures of the Woodland and Mission periods, respectively. Only in the 1980s did the post–Weeden Island ceramic assemblage indigenous to northern Florida begin to be distinguished , and the formal definition of Suwannee Valley crystallized only in the early 1990s. Despite its relatively recent emergence as a distinct archaeological horizon , the Suwannee Valley culture of northern Florida can now be claimed to represent one of the few Mississippi-period cultures across the southeastern United States for which there is a direct and essentially unequivocal identification with a thoroughly documented historic American Indian group—the Timucua—whose occupational history continued largely unbroken from the moment of first Spanish contact through the early eighteenth century. Though recent advances in ethnohistorical reconstructions of the social geography of the Southeast from the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries have permitted the identification of many ethnic and political correspondences between Mississippi-period archaeological cultures and named historic groups across much of the Southeast (Hudson 1987), ◀◆◆◆▶ 150 · John E. Worth this same body of research also has demonstrated convincingly the extent to which widespread sociopolitical and economic transformations and long-distance relocations during the colonial era affected many or most of those same Mississippian cultures, marking sometimes substantial discontinuities between pre- and post-European-contact data sets (Smith 1989). This does not appear to be the case with the Suwannee Valley culture, which demonstrates at minimum considerable geographic and biological continuity with postcontact Timucuan populations in the same region, as is also the case with a number of groups across much of Florida. Though internal transformations in material culture during the early historic era are clearly evident in the archaeological record of the Suwannee Valley region, available evidence nonetheless suggests that the Mississippi-period populations are largely continuous with missionized Timucuan populations in the same region, allowing a remarkable opportunity to examine the same group using extensive ethnohistorical information as a direct complement to archaeological data. Definition The archaeological culture now known as Suwannee Valley was initially defined during 1989 and 1990 excavations at the Fig Springs archaeological site in Columbia County, Florida (Weisman 1992; Worth 1990, 1992a). It should be noted here that, like most other cultures delineated in this volume for Mississippi-period Florida, Suwannee Valley is defined principally by archaeological evidence for material culture. Most particularly, it is recognized by a distinctive domestic ceramic assemblage comprising a suite of types that can be demonstrated to have been in use within a restricted geographic area over a specific length of time. Far from being a simplistic culture-historical equation of pots with people, the cultural unit described here as Suwannee Valley is viewed by this author more as a social interaction zone within which people and communities were connected far more extensively on a day-to-day basis with each other than with other individuals and groups outside this zone (see Rolland, chapter 6, this volume). The assortment of ceramic decorations and styles within Suwannee Valley was not so much a conscious and intentional communication of cultural identity as a simple secondary by-product of a shared aesthetic of household craft production among people whose lives were intertwined on a daily basis. Similarly, the ceramic style zone defined as the Suwannee Valley culture almost certainly does not delineate a neatly bounded political or An Overview of the Suwannee Valley Culture · 151 ethnic or even linguistic unit (for a more detailed explanation of this perspective , see Worth 2009: 203–7). Archaeological definitions of material culture “style zones” are perhaps best characterized less by their internal homogeneity and more by their external dissimilarity to other such zones. In this sense, what probably requires anthropological explanation are the reasons for long-term barriers to social interaction between geographic areas, as opposed to the reasons why relatives and neighbors in close geographic...