The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida: Volume I: Assimilation

John E. Worth
Foreword by Jerald T. Milanich, Series editor

Details: 288 pages     6 x 9
Cloth: $59.95   ISBN 13: 978-0-8130-1574-3   ISBN 10: 0-8130-1574-X   
Pubdate: 6/30/1998
Series: Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
Review(s): 8 available

Awards
Rembert Patrick Book Award - 1999

Overview

"Will appeal to a very wide audience that includes scholars in a number of fields, amateur historians and archaeologists, and people interested in Native American studies . . . and will serve as a paradigm for understanding the same developments elsewhere in Spanish Florida and the wider Spanish colonial world."--John H. Hann, site historian, San Luis Archaeological and Historic Site



This substantial two-volume work, incorporating the most current archaeological and historical investigation, studies the assimilation and eventual destruction of the indigenous Timucuan societies of interior Spanish Florida near St. Augustine, shedding new light on the nature and function of La Florida's entire mission system.
Beginning in volume I with analysis of the late prehistoric chiefdoms, John Worth traces the effects of European exploration and colonization in the late 1500s and describes the expansion of the mission frontier before 1630. As a framework for understanding the Timucuan rebellion of 1654 and its pacification, he explores the internal political and economic structure of the colonial system. In volume II, he shows that after the geographic and political restructuring of the Timucua mission province, the interior of Florida became a populated chain of way-stations along the royal road between St. Augustine and the Apalachee province. Finally, he describes rampant demographic collapse in the missions, followed by English sponsored raids, setting a stage for their final years in Florida during the mid-1700s.
The culmination of nearly a decade of original research, these books incorporate many previously unknown or little-used Spanish documentary sources. As an analysis of both the Timucuan chiefdoms and their integration into the colonial system, they offer important discussion of the colonial experience for indigenous groups across the nation and the rest of the Americas.
John E. Worth is anthropologist at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History in Atlanta, specializing in the ethnohistory and archaeology of the southeastern Indians during the Spanish colonial era. He is the author of The Struggle for the Georgia Coast: An Eighteenth-Century Spanish Retrospective on Guale and Mocama (1995) and many articles and book chapters.