Dr. John E Worth

We conduct a synthetic archaeological and ethnohistoric dating program to assess the timing and tempo of the spread of peaches, the first Eurasian domesticate to be adopted across Indigenous eastern North America, into the interior American Southeast by Indigenous communities who quickly " Indi-genized " the fruit. In doing so, we present what may be the earliest absolute dates for archaeological contexts containing preserved peach pits in what is today the United States in the early to mid-16 th century. Along with our broader chronological modeling, these early dates suggest that peaches were likely in the interior prior to permanent Spanish settlement in the American Southeast and that peaches spread independently of interactions with Spanish coloni-zers. We further argue that that eventual spread of peaches was structured exclusively by Indigenous communities and the ecologies produced through long-term Indigenous land management and land use practices, highlighting and centering the agency of Indigenous societies in the socioecological process of colonization.

Spanish Olive Jar is a ubiquitous marker of the Spanish colonial period in the southeastern United States, appearing on both terrestrial and maritime sites where colonists resided and traveled between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Olive Jar ceramic type has been the subject of many archaeological studies, most of which use vessel shape typologies and rim morphology to aid in the chronological placement of sites and proveniences where they are found, and more recently also using compositional analyses to determine locations of manufacture. Frequently lacking, however, is anything more than a cursory generic reference to what these vessels were likely to have originally contained, and how exactly they were used and reused by the people who lived and worked at the archaeological sites where their remains are so commonly found. The intent of this article is to explore primary source documents that provide quantifiable data to answer such questions, with the goal of enhancing the utility of Spanish Olive Jar for archaeological interpretation by situating it within its broader functional context as one of a number of different types of shipping containers used and reused in a variety of circumstances during the Spanish colonial period.

The town of Potano, refenced in sixteenth-century and in early seventeenth-century Spanish accounts of the exploration and settlement of the Southeast, is one of the named sites associated with the Hernando de Soto entrada that possesses sufficient documentary and archaeological evidence that would allow for its firm identification. The Richardson site, 8AL100, has long been known as a site which has both an early seventeenth-century Spanish and a late precontact/early contact Native American component. We contend, based on the documentary and archaeological evidence, that the Richardson site is the location of the early contact and mission-period town of Potano, and that claims made concerning the White Ranch site, 8MR3538, cannot be substantiated or verified.

Following the fortuitous 2015 discovery of a substantial assemblage of mid-16th-century Spanish ceramics in a residential neighborhood overlooking the Emanuel Point shipwrecks in Pensacola Bay, the University of West Florida Archaeology Institute worked with more than 120 landowners to conduct extensive archaeological testing across a broad area in order to determine the boundaries of and to explore the site. This article compares documentary and archaeological evidence to confirm the identification of the roughly 13–15 ha site as Tristán de Luna y Arellano’s 1559–1561 settlement,making it the largest mid-16th-century Spanish colonial site in the Southeast and the earliest multiyear European settlement in the entire United States.

Después del descubrimiento fortuito en 2015 de un conjunto sustancial de cerámica española de mediados del siglo 16 en un vecindario residencial con vistas a los naufragios de Emanuel Point en la Bahía de Pensacola, el Instituto de Arqueología de la Universidad de West Florida trabajó con más de 120 propietarios para realizar pruebas arqueológicas exhaustivas en un área amplia para determinar los límites y explorar el sitio. Este artículo compara la evidencia documental y arqueológica para confirmar la identificación del sitio de aproximadamente 13–15 ha como el asentamiento de Tristán de Luna y Arellano de 1559–1561, convirtiéndolo en el sitio colonial español más grande de mediados del siglo 16 en el sudeste y el primer asentamiento europeo de varios años en todo el territorio de Estados Unidos.

À la suite de la découverte fortuite en 2015 d'un assemblage considérable de céramiques espagnoles datant de la moitié du 16ème siècle dans un quartier résidentiel surplombant l'épave du Emanuel Point à Pensacola Bay, l'lnstitut d'archéologie de l'Université de Floride occidentale a collaboré avec plus de 120 propriétaires terriens afin de conduire de vastes opérations de tests archéologiques à travers une large zone, visant à déterminer les limites du site et à en faire l'exploration. Cet article compare des preuves documentaires et archéologiques afin de confirmer l'identification du site d'environ 13 à 15 hectares comme étant la colonie implantée en 1559 et 1561 désignée sous le nom de Tristán de Luna y Arellano. Ceci en ferait le site colonial espagnol le plus important dans le Sud-Ouest à la moitié du 16ème siècle et la toute première colonie européenne active durant plusieurs années pour tous les États-Unis.

There are many examples of colonial entanglements resulting in shifts in religions, practices, subsistence, and political structures, largely linked to inequalities between the colonized and the colonizers. However, there are also examples in which practices, particularly among Native American societies, persisted in the context of social situations that intertwined peoples with diverse histories. At the time of Spanish arrival, the Calusa of southwestern Florida were a large‐scale, hierarchical society with supra‐community integration and were able to maintain high degrees of autonomy. Our focus here is to explicate the early colonial world of the Calusa. Specifically, we want to understand why early European interactions take such a dramatically different course in southwestern Florida than in other areas of Spanish colonization. To do so we use political ecology and recent scholarship on eventful archaeology to consider Calusa and Spanish social and political action. Our work focuses on interactions between the Spanish and the Calusa during the early and mid‐sixteenth century (ca. 1513 to 1569 CE). We argue that because the Calusa were fisher‐gatherer‐hunters, lacked maize agriculture, and had their capital on the defensible island of Mound Key, Spanish‐Calusa interactions and events transpired in a fundamentally different context compared to other Spanish outposts and colonies. With this example, we show how various events, knowledge, and traditions of the Calusa of southern Florida all worked to create a vastly different colonial entanglement that resulted in the Spanish abandonment of the area for some time.

Not long after Spanish Florida became United States territory in 1821, the attention of Anglo-American settlers was drawn to the handful of remaining Spanish fishing ranchos along the lower gulf coastline, inhabited by Cuban fishermen and their “Spanish Indian” families and neighbors. The history and identity of these groups, many of whom were forcibly relocated west along with the Seminoles by 1841, has long remained enigmatic due to a paucity of documentation. This paper uses extensive new documentary data from Cuba and Spain to explore the emergence of these new creole communities during Florida’s British and second Spanish periods.

This comparative synthesis examines archaeological and ethnohistoric data pertaining to Native American coastal adaptations along the southern coasts of the eastern United States. We consider the totality of experiences of people living along coasts, examining such issues as technological innovation, environmental variability and change as it relates to site visibility, the built environment, the use of coastal food resources, the nature of complex coastal Calusa and Guale polities, and European contact. We link our topical discussions to broader issues in anthropology, arguing that the archaeology of southern coasts has much to contribute to our understanding of worldwide adaptations to coastal environments and broad-scale shifts in the trajectories of human societies.

Scholars have developed two broad approaches to researching the history of the native peoples of the American South from the sixteenth century to the present: culture history and social history. The essential task in culture history is to classify native so-called tribes into cultural and/or linguistic categories, to list defining cultural traits, and to show how these "tribes" have persisted, disappeared, or become acculturated. The essential task in social history is to reconstruct the structure of the societies and polities into which native peoples organized themselves within the context of native worlds and to show what happened to them when they came into contact with the modern world-system. Both approaches have been used to depict and explicate Cofitachequi, a native people first encountered by the Hernando de Soto expedition in 1540. Our purpose here is to point out flaws in the culture history approach and to emphasize strengths in the social history approach.