Archaeology
From "Laboring in the Fields of the Lord"
by Jerald T. Milanich
About the book: One of the great secrets of American history, more than 150 Spanish mission churches once dotted the landscape between modern Miami and the Chesapeake Bay. Built between the 1560s and 1760s, the missions were concentrated in what is now northern Florida and southern Georgia, but until recently their existence—and their influence on the region’s native groups—has remained virtually undetected. Their wood and thatch buildings burned or rotted away, and sweeping epidemics gradually wiped out the entire populations of the Timucua, Guale, and Apalachee Indians.
Drawing upon archaeological and historical research conducted during the last twenty years, archaeologist Jerald T. Milanich contends that the southeastern mission system, conceived as a way to save souls while converting a potentially hostile population into an essential labor force, was central to the Spanish colonial enterprise. He describes how Spanish officials and friars first baptized native chiefs in elaborate ceremonies, then took advantage of the chiefs’ traditional powers to demand agricultural and other work from their followers. Corn, the colony’s principal currency and export, was grown, harvested, shucked, ground into meal, and transported by Christianized Indians. The author also discussed the selective cultural changes the friars imposed: they allowed Indian groups to continue to build council houses and play a traditional, soccerlike game but worked hard to replace the practices of native shamans with baptisms, masses, and Catholic burial rites.
While the Indians of northern Florida and southern Georgia adapted to European rule more readily than their southwestern counterparts, the Spanish colonization of the Southeast took place against a backdrop of native revolts, widespread disease, and dwindling populations. Revealing the vital roles played by both Europeans and Native American groups in the two-hundred-year Spanish reign over “La Florida,” Laboring in the Fields of the Lord documents one of the least-known colonial encounters in the history of the Americas.
My central theme is simple: the missions of Spanish Florida should be viewed not as a benign offshoot of colonialism, but as colonialism itself. Religious education was a calculated way to save souls while converting a potentially hostile population into a labor force that toiled in support of the colony and its colonial overlords. Today the shadows of the past are being illuminated by archaeologists and historians intent on revealing what really happened in the Spanish mission provinces of Guale, Timucua, and Apalachee. But even the light of knowledge cannot brighten one dark truth: missions and colonialism must take most of the blame for the disappearance of a significant portion of the southeastern Indians. (from the Preface, p. xiv)
These excerpts from Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians by Jerald T. Milanich (Smithsonian Institution Press 1999) are used with the author’s permission. Milanich is an archaeologist and anthropologist who is Curator Emeritus of Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida in Gainesville. His area of specialization is Native American culture in Florida.
From Chapter 1, In Search of a Once Forgotten Land (pp. 24-25)
Our excitement grew as we correlated the archaeological evidence with new information derived from documents provided to us by John E. Worth, a University of Florida graduate student, and John H. Hann, a BAR historian (both of whom have recently authored books stemming from their research). Working in the Spanish archives in Seville, Worth found documents describing the event surrounding the Timucua Rebellion of 1656, an attempt by the people of interior northern Florida to rid themselves of the Spanish military government. The rebellion provided the governor of Spanish Florida, Diego de Rebolledo, with an excuse to reorganize the mission system of that region… . That reorganization saw the abandonment of some missions, the relocation of others, and the founding of new ones. These machinations were all part of an attempt to redistribute the Timucua Indians, who had been severely reduced in number due to diseases, along the camino real, between St. Augustine and Apalachee.
As a result, the rebellion changed the geography of the Timucuan missions. Calderón’s well-known account described the post-1656 alignment of Timucuan missions, not the many missions that had existed earlier, some of which were on the camino real and some well off of it on side trails. Johnson’s missions were two of the pre-1656 missions.
With this new information we could begin to answer questions posed in the 1970s. For instance, the Baptizing Spring site I had worked on in 1976 was the pre-1656 San Juan de Guacara mission that had been moved west to the Suwannee River at Charles Spring after the rebellion. B. Calvin Jones had located that later mission, one visited by Bishop Calderón. Another mission, one found by Kenneth W. Johnson, and later investigated by he and Samuel Chapman, could now be identified as pre-1656 Santa Cruz de Tarihica, located far north of the camino real. After the rebellion Santa Cruz de Tarihica was moved southwest of that trail to southern Suwannee County, Florida.
The knowledge that Timucuan mission geography was more complicated than anyone had ever suspected has also led to reidentification of mission sites discovered years ago. Thanks to archival sleuthing by John H. Hann the site of Fig Springs on the Ichetucknee River that John M. Goggin had thought was the post-1656 mission of Santa Catalina de Ajohica is now correctly identified as San Martín de Ayacuto. On Christmas Eve 1986, Johnson, while excavating near the spring head where Goggin had found mission period pottery 35 years before, had found a part of the clay floor of one of San Martín de Ayacuto’s mission buildings. That discovery would be the focus of several archaeological field seasons directed by BAR archaeologist Brent R. Weisman and later by myself, Rebecca Saunders, and Lisa M. Hoshower.
From Chapter 6, Born Under the Bell, pp. 150-151
At any one time, the mission provinces were required to provide 300 or more laborers to St. Augustine. Exact figures for the various provinces by year are lacking, though John E. Worth has found lists for Mocama and Guale for 1636 and several years from 1666 to 1673. Those lists, which reflect drafts for nine missions, indicate that the number of laborers for those regions dropped from fifty-four to twenty-seven over 30 years, a 50 percent reduction probably mirroring a similar reduction in the native population. After 1647 and the Apalachee rebellion and as the aboriginal population of Guale and Timucua declined, the number of conscripted laborers from Apalachee increased. At the time Father Moral recorded his observations, about 80 percent of the laborers came from Apalachee.
Bearers not only carried loads to St. Augustine, they also traveled trails leading from Apalachee and Timucua to the Gulf coast, where goods could be loaded on boats and shipped out by water around the peninsula to St. Augustine or to Cuba. Another way to reach St. Augustine from Apalachee or western Timucua was by canoe down the Wacissa-Aucilla River into the Gulf of Mexico and southward to the mouth of the Suwannee River, then up the Suwannee and Santa Fe River to the natural bridge at modern O’Leno State Park west of mission Santa Fé de Teleco. At the natural bridge the water route intersected with the camino real, and there, the goods could be loaded on human backs and moved the rest of the way to St. Augustine overland. The purpose of the mission of Cofa, established at the mouth of the Suwannee River, may have been to provide a stopover for canoe travelers using this route. A variant of this route might also have seen canoes putting in at mission San Martín de Ayacuto on the Ichetucknee River, a small tributary of the Santa Fe River, rather than continuing to the natural bridge.
In the late 1940s, archaeologist John M. Goggin and his students recovered hundreds of pieces of Spanish crockery and Indian pottery by the head of the spring leading to the Ichetucknee River from San Martín de Ayacuto. The huge amount of artifacts found there suggest that it was an often used canoe landing. Landing at San Martín de Ayacuto, travelers and bearers could have stayed the night at the mission and then continued their journey to St. Augustine on the camino real, which ran nearby.