Dr. John E Worth

The fall of Spanish Florida's western mission chain between 1704 and 1706 brought the ravages of the English-sponsored Indian slave trade into South Florida, which had previously remained isolated from intensive European contact for more than a century. The peninsula was quickly evacuated, with Indian refugees coalescing both to the south around present-day Miami and the Florida Keys and to the north around St. Augustine. Final remnants of both groups independently settled in Cuba in 1760 and 1763, leaving the entire southern peninsula under Creek domination. This paper presents newly-discovered details and ongoing analysis of this process.

Recent ethnohistorical and archaeological work regarding the Timucuan societies of southeast Georgia and northeastern Florida makes it possible to begin the difficult process of delineating the relationships between specific named political and ethnic groups and their corresponding archaeological material culture. This paper focuses on local and regional sociopolitical integration among coastal and mainland Timucuan groups, drawing on new evidence for the dates and circumstances of the foundation and termination of Spanish missions, and explores the relationship between documented demographic trends and population movements (including Guale and Yamassee immigration) with observed changes in material culture.

In 1656, the mission frontier of Spanish Florida erupted into rebellion when Lucas Menendez, principal chief of the Timucua, ordered the murder of all secular Spaniards in the province. Half a century of missionization was abruptly shattered, and seven people lay dead as a fortified Timucuan palisade was hurriedly constructed. New documentary evidence, combined with recent archaeological data, provides details of the process by which Timucua was gradually drawn into the colonial system centered in St. Augustine, and reveals the transformations and stresses which ultimately led to the rebellion. An overview of the region in the late precolumbian period provides a backdrop for early contacts between Spaniard and Indian during the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, entire aboriginal societies were integrated into the developing colonial system by Franciscan missionaries, resulting in the incorporation of three regional provinces to form the Timucua mission province. Although an overview of this colonial system reveals only limited structural linkages between Indian and Spanish societies, the colonial labor system, including the yearly repartimiento labor draft, burden-bearing, and the Indian militia, introduced stresses which contributed to the gradual erosion of chiefly power. The unanticipated consequences of missionization--frontier raiding, flight from the labor draft, epidemics, and inter-provincial migration--resulted in major demographic transformations, further exacerbating an already devastating situation. Lucas Menendez ruled an increasingly disfunctional society, and when the chiefs themselves were ordered to carry burdens during a massive activation of the Indian militia, rebellion ensued. In the aftermath of the capture, trial, and execution or imprisonment of virtually the entire aboriginal leadership of Timucua, a massive program of population relocation transformed Timucua from a dispersed indigenous society into a chain of populated way-stations along the Spanish royal road. The Timucuan Rebellion ultimately represented the culmination of a jurisdictional struggle between aboriginal chiefs and the Spanish military, and its failure only accelerated the integration of Timucua into the colonial system of Spanish Florida.