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

6. Mission Santa María: The Cemetery Structure of an Early Christian Church

6 Mission Santa María The Cemetery Structure of an Early Christian Church In the previous chapter I discussed the biological identity of the Santa María south cemetery sample. The individuals buried in this church were likely ethnic Timucua and likely lived during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, contra the long-held notion that this sample represents a late mission period (circa 1680s) Yamassee population of recent immigrants to the Florida coast. Furthermore, given the phenotypic and bioarchaeological similarity between the Santa María and Santa Catalina ossuary samples and the almost assuredly transitional, early date of the latter, it appears as if the Santa María sample represents individuals for whom conversion to Christianity was fairly recent. The site, then, may represent one of the earliest Christian churches in La Florida for which we have biological data from human remains. This chapter focuses once again on the internal structure of graves in mission churches. Although half of the burials at Santa María were lost to erosion, the graves that remained in place at the time of excavation were discrete and the amount of burial disturbance and commingling was relatively small (although excavators did identify redeposited remains). Thus, intracemetery spatial analysis of burials from mission Santa María adds a fourth data point for mission cemetery structure that complements those presented in previous chapters. In particular, it appears that the founding community’s rules of grave placement and interpretation of Christian burial doctrine were not erased or modified by subsequent generations of burial. In addition, several atypical burials are documented at the site, and it is possible that some Yamassee may yet be found in the sample that has born their name for so long. I first summarize existing archaeological literature on this well-known yet enigmatic church sample before presenting more formal analyses of spatial and phenotypic structure. 196 · Mission Cemeteries, Mission Peoples The Mission Santa María South Cemetery Historical documentation detailing mission doctrinas and visitas in the area of Amelia Island (Bushnell 1986; Hann 1987, 1990; Worth 2005, 2009) were discussed in the previous chapter. Archaeologists have been interested in the island since the 1950s (Bullen and Griffin 1952), and knowledge that burials were eroding into the nearby creek dates to several decades before that (Larsen 1993; Milanich and Saunders 1986; Saunders 1988). However, the fact that two missions located within 30–40 meters of each other (see Figure 4.14) were located on different modern property lots complicated earlier interpretations of the site. It was only with extensive and near-complete exploration of the broader archaeology of the area that the nature of the church complexes became apparent, and by extension the association of the burials eroding into Harrison Creek was determined . Saunders (1993, 35) clarifies this succinctly: the Harrison Homestead site was originally called 8Na41 by Bullen and Griffin (1952), but the northern three acres of the site has been renamed the Dorion property and has been given the formal designation 8Na41d. The Dorion property contains the remains of the larger Santa Catalina de Guale de Santa María mission discussed in chapter 4. However, all previous references to burials found at the site actually refer to part of the south cemetery complex detailed in this chapter, even though these early reports refer to all of these finds as that of mission Santa Catalina de Guale de Santa María. As Saunders (1993) notes, the location of this mission was never fully lost to history and the first archaeologists who were interested in the Spanish period remains of the island assumed that they all belonged to the Guale mission known in the historical record. Additional excavation revealed that the burials that eroded into the creek were spatially separated from the Guale period mission church complex. Thus, a second cemetery was formally designated (Milanich and Saunders 1986; Saunders 1988, 1993). This secondary area of burial was explored by Larsen and Saunders in 1986 and then fully excavated in 1987, producing the sample used here and in other bioarchaeological analyses (Larsen 1993, 2001). Saunders (1993) summarized the architectural evidence from the site, and Larsen (1993) presented a synthesis of the burial evidence. Saunders (1988) provides the most detailed assessments of burial organization, and I used these data to generate the hypotheses tested here (see Figure 6.1). Figure 6.1. Map of Santa María south cemetery showing burial numbers and...