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

1. Life and Death in Spanish Colonial Florida

1 Life and Death in Spanish Colonial Florida I begin with a basic question: What do we know about Spanish Florida? The answer, of course, is quite a bit, and in this chapter I summarize (as briefly as possible) the expansive historical and archaeological literatures to provide a broader context for the inferences I offer using intracemetery approaches in the chapters that follow. I first summarize the major historical events and places of the Spanish mission period and provide summary information about the cultural groups included in the Spanish sphere of influence. I then focus specifically on the two issues most relevant to the broader arc of research presented in the following chapters: Native American health, diet, and demography during the seventeenth century and the structure of mission church cemeteries. La Florida: A Brief History Spain’s presence in North America began with a series of sixteenth-century Spanish entradas into North America after the successful “conquest” of the Aztecs and Incas. Spanish dominance of the southeastern United States culminated with the transformation of the cultural geography of the entire region when Native American tribes of today—Creeks, Seminoles, Mikasukis—emerged through processes of ethnogenesis (Cline 1974; Covington 1993; Hahn 2002, 2004; Sattler 1996; Sider 1994; Stojanowski 2010; Sturtevant 1971; Weisman 1989, 2000; Wickman 1999; Wright 1981, 1986). The interim is what we call the Spanish mission period of La Florida . These earliest entradas by de León (1513), Narváez (1528), and de Soto (1539) (among others) provide some of the best ethnohistoric texts from a critical protohistoric period (e.g., Elvas, Ranjel, and Biedma in Bourne 1904, Garcilaso de la Vega in Varner and Varner 1951; Barcia 1951; see also Ribaud [1563] 1927, Davis 1935; Milanich and Proctor 1978; Milanich 16 · Mission Cemeteries, Mission Peoples and Sturtevant 1972; Reilly 1981), when native life had presumably been minimally transformed by European political economies, warfare, and pestilence. Although it is likely that these entradas initiated some incipient changes in native society, they were not a success from the Crown’s perspective: permanent settlement was not achieved and the land was not secured for Spain. However, escalating competition between Spain and France assured that colonization would eventually occur. And by the mid-sixteenth century , a handful of settlements had been established on the southeastern Atlantic coast. These include the Spanish colonies of St. Augustine and Santa Elena and the French settlements of Charlesfort and Fort Caroline . The first of these, St. Augustine, founded in 1565 by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, was the only settlement to achieve permanence, thus fulfilling the Crown’s interest in rebuffing French claims to North America (Lyon 1974, 1990; Milanich 1990; Spellman 1965; Sturtevant 1962) while protecting shipments of precious metals leaving Veracruz bound for the Iberian Peninsula (Sluiter 1985; Weddle 2000). And so La Florida, which de León had claimed some two decades earlier, was secured for the Spanish for the next two centuries. This early date of settlement reflects the already extensive history of Spanish intervention in the New World, a history of successes as well as failures. From the Crown’s perspective, one of the successes was the conquista a fuego y sangre of the great “empires” of Central and South America, whereas the complete and rapid annihilation of the indigenous labor supply in the Caribbean colonies caused Spain to reconsider its colonization strategy. Although the papal donation of 1493 established Christian conversion as one goal of Spain’s imperialism, this effort was often secondary to the prime mover of European interest—wealth extraction . As Bolton noted, the Spanish desired to “convert, . . . civilize, . . . and exploit [the native populations].” (Bolton 1917, 43) To this end, the Laws of Burgos (1512) established the encomienda as a means of extracting labor tribute from local populations; religious conversion was offered in exchange (Deagan 1990b; Thomas 1988a, 1990). However, the encomienda was never established in La Florida, in part because there was limited wealth to extract from the colony’s lands (Deagan 1985; Thomas 1988a, 1990, 1992), and the system was all but outlawed in the 1540s through the work of Bartholomew de las Casas (Hussey 1932). The Pacification Ordinances of 1573 ended the military campaign in favor of a concerted Life and Death in Spanish Colonial Florida · 17 religious approach, the conquista de almas.1 The year 1573 also marked the beginning of sustained work in La Florida by the Franciscans, who, with...