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Archaeological evidence of colonialism: Franciscan Spanish missions in La Florida
Abstract
Archival sources have documented the role of the Franciscan missions (1573-1763) in the colonization of La Florida. Is there corresponding archaeological evidence for the process of colonization? By comparing the pre-mission archaeological record of native peoples with that of their mission-dwelling descendants we can begin to discern such phenomena, including changes in agricultural production and practices, the resettlement and consolidation of native populations, bio-archaeological data, new burial patterns, and the accumulation of specific categories of European-made items.
Beginning in 1968, the Florida Division of Historical Resources sponsored several small-scale testing programs of Spanish mission sites in northern Florida. A formal model of Mission-period settlement structure emerged from those excavations. However, more recent excavations involving large block exposures at a few mission compounds have shown settlement structure to be more complex, and less regular, than modeled. Such is the case at San Martín de Timucua. Recent excavations there have demonstrated that the imposition of the preexisting model on results from previous limited excavations has resulted in misinterpretations of structure architecture and function as well as site layout. These results demonstrate that long-term commitments to extensive excavations will be necessary to understand intrasite settlement patterns in Florida missions.
Despite a historical propensity to characterize the Spanish treatment of Native Americans as brutal, archaeological and historic data gathered since 1984 from religious, civic, and domestic contexts at San Luis have revealed otherwise. It appears that both Spanish and Apalachee residents maintained a strong sense of their respective cultural identities and material life, and demonstrated a marked degree of accommodation.
The traditional architectural styles of the Apalachee of northern Florida and Spanish colonists in the New World represent distinct approaches to the organization of domestic and community space and reflect different attitudes toward public and private activities. To the degree that the Apalachee became Hispanicized or that the Spaniards in Apalachee adopted aspects of aboriginal lifestyles during the seventeenth-century mission period, we might expect to see changes in architecture and community organization. Archaeological and ethnohistorical data from Apalachee Province indicate that the shapes and spatial arrangement of native and European domestic structures changed very little as a result of contact. This suggests that each group maintained a distinct identity in the realm of residential organization, despite the profound changes that both the Apalachee and Spaniards made in other aspects of their lives as a result of European colonization in La Florida.