Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions : New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory [1 ed.] 9780816598892, 9780816530519

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Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions

The Archaeology of Colonialism in Native North America Series Editors Liam Frink and Aubrey Cannon Editorial Board Alice Kehoe Patricia Rubertone Stephen Silliman Katherine Spielmann Michael Wilcox

Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions New Perspectives from Archaeology and Ethnohistory

Edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider

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The University of Arizona Press © 2014 The Arizona Board of Regents All rights reserved www.uapress.arizona.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Indigenous landscapes and Spanish missions : new perspectives from archaeology and ethnohistory / edited by Lee M. Panich and Tsim D. Schneider. p. cm. — (The archaeology of colonialism in native North America) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8165-3051-9 (hardback) 1. Indians of North America—Missions—History. 2. Indians of North America—Cultural assimilation. 3. Missions, Spanish—North America—History. 4. Ethnohistory—North America. I. Panich, Lee M., 1978–, author, editor of compilation. II. Schneider, Tsim D., 1979–, author, editor of compilation. E98.M6I64 2014 970.004'97—dc23 2013038700 Publication of this book was made possible in part by financial support from Santa Clara University.

Manufactured in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper containing a minimum of 30% post-consumer waste and processed chlorine free.

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction 1. Native Agency at the Margins of Empire: Indigenous Landscapes, Spanish Missions, and Contested Histories 5 Tsim D. Schneider and Lee M. Panich Part I. Power, Politics, and Belief 2. The Guale Uprising of 1597: An Archaeological Perspective from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (Georgia) 25 Elliot H. Blair and David Hurst Thomas 3. Missionization, Negotiation, and Belief: The Role of the Acuera Chiefdom in Colonial Seventeenth-Century Florida 41 Willet A. Boyer III 4. Missions Untenable: Experiences of the Hasinai Caddo and the Spanish in East Texas 57 Paul Shawn Marceaux and Mariah F. Wade Part II. External Connections 5. Who Were the Guale?: Reevaluating Interaction in the Mission Town of San Joseph de Sapala 79 Christopher R. Moore and Richard W. Jefferies 6. “Countless Heathens”: Native Americans and the Spanish Missions of Southern Texas and Northeastern Coahuila 93 Tamra L. Walter and Thomas R. Hester 7. Indigenous Landscapes: Mexicanized Indians and the Archaeology of Social Networks in Alta California 114 Rubén G. Mendoza

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Part III. Outside the Mission Walls 8. Depriving God and the King of the Means of Charity: Early Nineteenth-Century Missionaries’ Views of Cattle Ranchers near Mission La Purísima, California 135 Glenn J. Farris 9. Points of Refuge in the South Central California Colonial Hinterlands 154 Julienne Bernard, David Robinson, and Fraser Sturt 10. Toward a Historical Ecology of the Mission in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico 172 Mark T. Lycett Conclusion: Reflections on Spanish Missions in the Native Landscape 11. A Cubist Perspective of Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions 191 Kent G. Lightfoot References Cited 209 Contributors 244 Index 250

Acknowledgments This volume began as a symposium titled “New Perspectives on

Spanish Missions in the Indigenous Landscape” that we organized for the 44th annual conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology held in Austin, Texas, in January 2011. Many of the chapters are the extensions and elaborations of papers given in that session; others were solicited later to round out the volume’s geographical and thematic coverage. David Hurst Thomas and Mariah F. Wade served as discussants for the original symposium, and we are grateful for their comments and their continued participation on this project. Several scholars who presented on this multifaceted topic in Austin are missing from these pages. Chelsea Blackmore and Sarah Peelo, Esteban Gomez, and Michael Wilcox all provided stimulating papers in the initial session. We thank them and look forward to keeping up with their important work in other venues. We sincerely appreciate the hard work that the contributors have devoted to the chapters collected here. The diversity of approaches represented by this volume gives us great hope for the continued relevance and contribution of mission archaeology. Kent Lightfoot has done an admirable job finding the common threads that are woven throughout the volume and that point to still further avenues of investigation. We owe Kent a debt of gratitude not just for his contribution to this volume, but for his friendship and mentoring over the years. Allyson Carter, the staff of the University of Arizona Press, and their production team deserve ample credit for their assistance, vision, and attention to detail. We thank Liam Frink and Aubrey Cannon for including this volume in the Archaeology of Colonialism in Native North America series. The insightful comments and suggestions of two anonymous reviewers also greatly improved this volume. Lee Panich thanks Lucy Diekmann, Tessa Panich, and Oliver Panich for their understanding during the preparation of this book, as well as the Paipai Indian community of Santa Catarina for their hospitality and support during his initial foray into mission archaeology. Lee also thanks the College of Arts and Sciences and the Office of the Provost at Santa Clara University for supporting the publication of this volume. Tsim Schneider thanks Liz Soluri for her support and patience during this project, his family for their interest and constant encouragement, and the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and the California Department of Parks and Recreation for making his research vii

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possible. Additional thanks go to Kathryn and Philip Schneider who generously paid for the indexing of this volume. We dedicate this volume to the memory of Feliciano Cañedo and Abelardo Ceseña. Feliciano and Abelardo were both instrumental in setting up the archaeological research project at Mission Santa Catalina in Baja California, Mexico, that crystallized much of our thinking on the place of missions within broader indigenous landscapes and histories. Both men were leaders of the Paipai community of Santa Catarina, and they are sorely missed by their community and by those who had the privilege of working with them. Descansen en paz.

Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions

Introduction

1 Native Agency at the Margins of Empire Indigenous Landscapes, Spanish Missions, and Contested Histories

Tsim D. Schneider and Lee M. Panich

Between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, Catholic missionaries from Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican orders established and operated missions in what has come to be known as the Spanish Borderlands—extending from the Florida and Georgia coasts west to the Californias.1 Throughout this vast region, Native people built mission buildings, raised mission crops, and tended mission herds, but in many cases they also maintained strong ties to their ancestral homelands and to indigenous communities living outside of colonial control. Recent archaeological and ethnohistorical research on Spanish colonialism in North America looks beyond the well-known tripartite system of missions, pueblos, and presidios to a range of sacred and secular spaces, broadening scholarly understanding of the indigenous experience of missionization to include the myriad ways Native people creatively negotiated the constraints and opportunities of the colonial period. We seek to continue this trend by bringing together a diverse group of scholars to consider the potential for studying Spanish missions within indigenous landscapes, broadly conceived. Rather than simply seeing missions as irreversible entry points of Indigenous people into colonial society, the contributors to this volume look to understand the varied ways that Native people incorporated the Spanish mission system into dynamic indigenous landscapes.

1. For further information on imperial Spain and missionization, see Elliot (2002) and Kamen (2003). Wade (2008) provides a concise overview of the Jesuit and Franciscan missionary operations in the Spanish Borderlands of North America.

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In this sense, we hope to move toward the “cubist perspective” on Spanish colonialism outlined by Thomas (1989a, 1991b) in the seminal multivolume work Columbian Consequences. This analogy posits that research on the missions, as well as other aspects of the Spanish colonial program, can be addressed from a variety of approaches and viewpoints, rather than from a single research paradigm. To be sure, many scholars have identified or alluded to connections that mission communities had to the broader landscape, but in general archaeological and historical investigations into the mission period usually focus on mission sites themselves. Yet the mission experience extended far outside the mission walls, to the nearby neophyte rancherias, to mission stations and outlying ranchos, to unmissionized indigenous villages, and often far into the colonial hinterlands where Native individuals and families sought refuge, procured local resources, and traded colonial goods to distant groups linked through wide-ranging and enduring exchange networks. A focus on the Native landscape thus provides a window into Indigenous people’s active negotiation of colonialism and also offers a more holistic view on the mission enterprise and its consequences. The wide diversity of data sets and research questions explored by the contributors to this collection also underscores the potential of multiple, cross-cutting perspectives for generating new

Figure 1.1. Geographic locations of study areas addressed in each chapter. Map by Starla Lane.

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and important insights into the complex and often contested histories of the Spanish Borderlands. The overarching goal of this volume is to highlight the agency of Native people living in the Spanish Borderlands of North America, where missions were the primary institution of colonization (figure 1.1). By agency, we mean the interested action of individuals and groups, derived from existing cultural values and mediated by the ever-shifting constraints and opportunities of the material and social world. In highlighting the agency of Native people on the margins of the Spanish empire, we hope to further underscore our belief that missions were more than colonial outposts—they were also indigenous places. As such, missions should be understood within the context of indigenous cultures and histories, not simply as sites of colonial settlement and venues of cultural domination. In thinking about these issues, the contributors of this volume touch on three main themes or linkages between mission sites and the broader Native landscape: (1) power, politics, and belief; (2) external connections such as trade networks and subsistence practices; and (3) the continued occupation of colonial hinterlands, including refuge communities. While these connections are by no means mutually exclusive, we have organized the volume thematically to highlight the various ways in which archaeologists are considering Native people’s active negotiations of the Spanish mission system in North America. The first section of the volume focuses on the intersections of Native and colonial power structures, politics, and belief systems. Blair and Thomas in chapter 2 and Boyer in chapter 3 explore issues of religious belief, identity, and political wrangling among competing chiefdoms in colonial La Florida. In a similar vein, in chapter 4 Marceaux and Wade document the complex political and economic forces that led the Hasinai Caddo to reject Spanish efforts of missionization in East Texas over the course of several decades. Central to all three chapters is the idea that the Spanish missions of these regions were established not in a cultural vacuum but, rather, in landscapes that had existing tensions, alliances, and systems of belief. In the second section, contributors set out to address missions from the perspective of their indigenous inhabitants, focusing on the social, economic, and historical connections that mission neophytes had to the surrounding landscapes. In chapter 5, Moore and Jefferies seek to contextualize the social and technological changes of the colonial period within the long-term history of the Guale people who inhabited the mission of San Joseph de Sapala in modern-day Georgia. Walter and Hester in chapter 6 examine the changing ways in which local Native people viewed the missions of southeastern Texas, as well as the archaeological evidence for continued interaction in regional

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Introduction

networks despite the increasingly restrictive nature of the mission regime. And in chapter 7 Mendoza marshals evidence from missions along Alta California’s Central Coast to consider how the cultural trappings of mestizaje were incorporated into existing indigenous identities and social relationships, as well as the implications of such transformation for the persistence of indigenous identities. The third section considers colonial hinterlands and the worlds beyond the mission walls. Farris provides an intriguing case study from California in chapter 8 that expands our understanding of the mission experience by examining the ways in which mission neophytes, missionaries, and colonial elites vied for access to land and natural resources. In chapter 9, Bernard, Robinson, and Sturt explore the little-understood social worlds of Native people seeking refuge from Spanish missions in the ancient yet dynamic cultural landscape of the nearby hinterlands of Southern California. Lycett, in chapter 10, offers a window into the ever-changing landscapes of colonial New Mexico where missions served as central places in wide-ranging social and economic networks that cross-cut traditional notions of colonizer and colonized. The volume concludes with a chapter by Lightfoot, who reflects on the potential for mission archaeology to propel theoretical debate in the archaeology of colonialism.

A Californian Perspective Our perspective on the archaeology of Spanish missions is colored by our own experiences collaborating with Native communities to study the colonial period of Alta and Baja California. In our research, we are continually struck by how the archaeological and ethnohistorical record for the California colonies challenges traditional views of missions either as isolated institutions of enlightenment and industry or as frontier outposts that were home to defeated and moribund Indian populations. In neither perspective, nor too often in the various permutations in between, do indigenous people play a truly active role in their negotiation of the Spanish mission system. Instead, Native groups are seen to have entered the orbit of the missions never again to fully participate in the making of their own history. In California, many works, including widely cited general references on California archaeology and anthropology, suggest that the Franciscan missionaries established an authoritarian rule that left Native people in a state of (near) enslavement (Chartkoff and Chartkoff 1984:259; Castillo 1978:101; see also Archibald 1978). This pattern of interpretation led early anthropologists to conclude that many tribes whose an-

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cestors joined the missions had become extinct, a sentiment that was echoed in governmental policies that left most former mission Indians landless and without federal recognition as authentic tribal groups (Field et al. 1992; Lightfoot 2005). Yet as we explore elsewhere (Lightfoot et al. 2013; Panich 2013), many of these same groups have persisted in various forms into the present. The pattern of scholarly and public misunderstandings of the legacies of missionization in California is emblematic of three interrelated issues that we believe color the study of missions across the Spanish Borderlands. The first is the idea that, once Native people joined a mission community, they could not leave. From the missionaries’ point of view, baptism typically did represent a binding commitment of an individual to the mission community, through what we might think of as a kind of “spiritual debt peonage” (Sandos 2004:108). In this sense, baptized Indians were considered legal wards of the Church and—in the eyes of the paternal padres—forfeited personal freedoms once converted to Christianity. Nevertheless, there appears to have been significant flexibility in how this arrangement played out in practice through time and across Spanish America. We suspect that a careful reading of the archaeological and ethnohistorical record will reveal additional evidence of how Native people negotiated such constraints to their mobility and ability to carry out traditional cultural practices, both illicitly and with the consent of the missionaries. Second, scholarship on colonialism throughout the world perpetuates the ideal of missions as “carceral institutions” where colonial programs, carefully designed by Europeans or Euro-Americans, were dominant and served to gradually eliminate indigenous cultures (Lydon 2009:248). In California, in particular, the majority of scholarly investigations into the indigenous populations of Spanish missions focus on the topics of acculturation and/or demographic collapse (Cook 1976; Deetz 1963; Farnsworth 1989; Hoover 1992; Jackson 1994; Jackson and Castillo 1995; among many others). For example, Milliken (1995) suggests that local indigenous peoples in the San Francisco Bay Area internalized their perceived cultural inferiority, leaving them defeated and at the mercy of Spanish domination. Although he makes a compelling case for why Native individuals and families would enter the Spanish mission system in the first place, Native agency is effectively lost once inside the mission institution. We recognize the very real violence of the colonial period, and we understand the rationale behind the efforts of scholars and Native peoples alike to make visible the violence perpetrated against indigenous groups worldwide, but we are apprehensive that, if taken too far, this approach reduces the study of colonialism in the Americas to one of “European agents and Indian victims” (Taylor and Pease 1994:12).

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Introduction

The first two issues are symptomatic of the third: archaeological investigations into the process of Spanish missionization in California, as elsewhere, have traditionally centered on the physical remains of mission structures (Allen 2010; Van Buren 2010:160), often leaving the Native people who populated such sites in the background. Across North America, much of the early archaeology of Spanish missions focused on locating lost mission sites or sought to understand and corroborate the architectural layout, room use, and construction history of core mission complexes. Such a mission-centric outlook leads naturally to interpretive frameworks that effectively ignore the Native contributions to mission communities or to scholarly debates that focus on data easily obtainable at and for mission sites, including the directed culture change instituted by the missionaries, the notable morbidity and mortality rates at many missions, and the assumed efficacy of discipline and disease in suppressing the culture and agency of indigenous peoples. Certainly the story of Spanish missionization in North America, or any colonial system, is varied and complex. Yet a critical part of these histories hinges on the ways in which Native people actively negotiated Spanish colonialism on their own terms. In our view, understanding that process requires examining not only indirect reactions to colonization (e.g., disease or acculturation) but also how diverse Native American groups did or did not incorporate Spanish mission sites into their own systems of power, belief, exchange, subsistence, and residence. The goal of this volume, then, is to consider alternate avenues of understanding the experiences of Native people who engaged in various ways with the Spanish mission system across the vast Spanish Borderlands of North America.

Power, Belief, and Politics The intertwined concepts of power, belief, and politics structured the mission experience for both colonizers and indigenous peoples. Within the study of Native peoples in Spanish America, these issues have often been approached from the dual themes of domination and resistance, reflecting a deeply ingrained notion that Spanish missions were highly structured spaces that left little room for Native agency except for revolt, the murder of padres, sabotage, and delinquency. Indeed, the underlying assumption seems to be that Native people living at mission sites were caught in a system from which they could not hope to free themselves. Power and politics are clearly important interpretive frameworks, but a strict domination–resistance framework foregrounds Euro-American agency at the expense of Native Americans, who are viewed as

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reactionary rather than creative (Liebmann and Murphy 2010; see also chapter 3, this volume). Furthermore, Native agency—whether in the realm of resistance or in other aspects of daily life, such as food preparation—was variable. Individuals had differing motivations that conditioned their daily transactions, and opportunities often cleaved along such lines as gender, status, and age (Scarry 2010; see also Voss 2008). As scholars working in various regions are demonstrating, Spanish missions were established in existing cultural landscapes that often had their own deeply contested histories and symbolism. Despite such misgivings, there is ample archaeological evidence that indigenous people negotiated missionization through small, quotidian acts of opposition, practices that Saunders (1998) and other scholars (e.g., Deeds 2003) have likened to the “weapons of the weak” and “hidden transcripts,” as outlined by James Scott (1985, 1990). This theme has been particularly appealing to archaeologists who work with the residues of daily practice that often seem to indicate mission neophytes engaged in passive forms of resistance behind closed doors or beyond direct colonial control. In the Southwest, archaeologists have demonstrated that, in addition to the overt resistance epitomized by the Pueblo Revolt of 1680—in which Pueblo peoples launched a broad offensive against the Franciscan mission system—negotiation of missionization involved not just armed resistance but also more subtle reinterpretations of symbolism and material culture that took place across the broader landscape (Liebmann 2012; Preucel 2002). Spielmann et al. (2006), for example, employ Scott’s models to understand how Pueblo women subverted the messages of Spanish missionaries by both masking iconography on ceramic vessels made at mission settlements and elaborating such iconography in areas outside of the missionaries’ reach. An exploration of symbolism in Hopi rock art during the colonial period by Dongoske and Dongoske (2002) similarly suggests that Hopi people outwardly accepted aspects of Spanish indoctrination in order to appease Franciscan missionaries while also continuing their own traditional rock art practices and related ceremonial activities. As several chapters in this volume demonstrate, the missions of La Florida were the scene of complex political accommodations and shifting alliances among missionaries, secular colonists, and diverse Native peoples (and see chapters 4 and 6, this volume, for examples of similarly tenuous political relationships in colonial Texas). The nature of indigenous political economy in the region, in which many Native polities were organized into myriad simple or complex chiefdoms reliant on agricultural production, allowed the Franciscans to establish missions in existing Native towns rather than congregate dispersed Native peoples through policies of reducción, as was widely done elsewhere (Milanich 1995; Saunders 1998). At Mission San Luis de Talimali,

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Introduction

for example, the main plaza was bounded by both a mission church and an indigenous council house, reflecting the balance of missionary and chiefly power and underscoring the political accommodation on the part of both the colonizer and colonized (McEwan 1991). Chapter 3 in this volume suggests that such accommodation may have been structured by enduring systems of belief that provided Native societies the wherewithal to maintain relative cohesion in the face of colonization. As detailed by Wade (2008:234), the Calusa of southeastern Florida never accepted missionization and were ambivalent about Catholicism—though they learned and understood Church doctrine, they ultimately “chose not to accept it.” Tensions also existed between various groups of indigenous peoples, and the historical record suggests that the decision to accept, or even request, missionization was often made not simply out of the desire to convert to Christianity or Euro-American lifeways but, rather, to strengthen the position of one’s own group in relation to other neighboring chiefdoms (Milanich 1999; Saunders 1998). In seeking to understand Native agency in the missions, the question of differential status or identities among Native neophyte populations is receiving newfound attention. Missionaries often employed a hierarchical system of limited self-governance that relied on elected indigenous officials to help maintain order and ensure compliance with mission rules (Wade 2008:203–5). In California, Native alcaldes and regidores (typically men) enjoyed positions of relative power within a particular mission (Farris and Johnson 1999; Lightfoot 2005:104–7), and recent research is illuminating how many Native people both within and outside mission communities resented the reshuffling of power and political relationships to satisfy colonial hierarchies, leading to simmering hostilities among various indigenous constituencies (Hackel 2005). Mission labor further upended social roles within Native society and, along with the political hierarchy of the mission, offered opportunities for Native people and colonists to coin new social identities (Silliman 2001; Voss 2005). In many regions of the Borderlands, Native laborers worked outside of mission contexts, which may have enhanced their access to colonial goods or positions of relative power. Research in California has also revealed how sexuality and kin relationships were reworked in and out of mission settings. While missionaries expressed unease at the continued practice of polygyny and conjugal visits taking place during trips away from the missions, the institution of marriage was used to reinforce boundaries for appropriate sexual activity and morality among mission neophytes (Newell 2005:70–71; see also Voss 2000). Goerke (2007) offers a fascinating account of Marin, a Coast Miwok leader who had a

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decidedly ambivalent relationship with the mission system: mission records and colonial accounts suggest that he rose quickly through the mission hierarchy, ultimately achieving the rank of mayordomo, but that in his later years he turned against the mission system while still serving as a witness at mission weddings and a godparent to neophyte children. Indeed, compadrazgo, the social relationships stemming from godparenthood, was additionally used to cement and reorganize political and kin alliances that extended well outside mission walls, often binding together Native and colonial families (Crosby 1994; Newell 2009).

From the Mission, Looking Out As the loci of most scholarly investigations into the mission period in the Spanish Borderlands, missions themselves with their abundant archaeological and historical records can offer insights into how Native people maintained their engagement with the broader landscape. The rise of the cultural resource management industry, as well as broad scholarly interest in culture contact and colonialism, has led to a proliferation of archaeological investigations of mission sites in the United States. In many cases these studies have included archaeological investigations of neophyte barracks or habitation areas, which, in tandem with colonial accounts, serve to document Native foods, lithic and bone tools, and shell artifacts, as well as basketry and featherwork, that speak to the opportunities available to neophytes to acquire or directly obtain these items while in residence at missions. Similarly, new research is expanding our understanding of the place of missionization within the long-term historical and cultural trajectories of indigenous groups. In this way, missions can be understood as single points in broader, contested landscapes in which multiple histories have intersected and overlapped from precontact times through the present. Missions may, in fact, have served as nodes in broader exchange systems that continued to evolve during and after the colonial period. In the Californias, large numbers of shell beads—typically perforated with metal needles— recovered at mission sites provide evidence of such networks. Excavations at missions including Santa Cruz and San Buenaventura have yielded detritus associated with the manufacture of Olivella biplicata shell beads, suggesting that mission neophytes were actively producing beads for personal use or for trade (Allen 1998:73; Gibson 1976). In their investigation of a historic-era bead assemblage from San Diego County, Gamble and Zepeda (2002) posit

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Introduction

that beads manufactured by Chumash groups, such as those living at San Buenaventura, may have been traded south to the Kumeyaay region. At Mission Santa Clara, south of San Francisco Bay, large numbers of clamshell beads likely associated with Yokuts groups from the Central Valley are found in later mission-period deposits, reflecting changing ties to the landscape as the mission’s demographic composition shifted over time (Allen et al. 2010:171). Glass beads may also offer similar insights; beads that were possibly obtained from mission establishments along the coast have been found in significant quantities in Alta California’s San Joaquin and Owens Valleys, suggesting that certain mission neophytes may have been involved in far-flung trade networks (Arkush 1993). Archaeological work has also uncovered ample evidence of huntingand-gathering practices at mission sites. Faunal assemblages from La Florida, for example, suggest that Native groups in many of the region’s mission provinces relied heavily on locally available terrestrial and marine resources, particularly during the early years of colonization (Reitz 1993). And although some Native peoples in La Florida enjoyed domesticated crops such as maize, beans, squash, and sunflowers before the arrival of the Spanish, archaeobotanical evidence indicates that they continued to consume indigenous crops, as well as other locally available wild plants, during the mission period (Scarry 1993). At Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga in Texas, wild taxa identified in mission-period assemblages similarly speak to the ability or necessity of mission neophytes to maintain access to the surrounding landscape. Large numbers of specialized stone projectile points and other tools recovered from a neophyte habitation area at the mission also reflect the continued importance of hunting in order to enhance the diet provided at the mission (Walter 2007). Archaeological investigations at missions in Alta and Baja California have additionally yielded marked evidence for varying degrees of hunting and gathering on the part of mission neophytes (Allen 1998:81–82; Lightfoot 2005; Panich 2010b; Wade 2008). The historical evidence for hunting and gathering by mission neophytes is particularly rich, as evidenced by statements collected in a questionnaire completed by Alta California missionaries in 1813–15. These vividly detailed documents indicate that neophytes at most of Alta California’s twenty-one missions continued to consume wild plants and animals (and see chapter 8, this volume). The padres at Mission San Antonio, for example, wrote that, “in private, in their own houses, they prepare their seeds which are of good quality and in abundance such as acorns, sage, chia, pine nuts and others” (Geiger and Meighan 1976:87). Indeed, many mission Indians continued to hunt, gather, and collect Native foods, including acorns, seeds, fruits, fish, shellfish,

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waterfowl, and game, remaining “very fond of the food they enjoyed in their pagan state” (Geiger and Meighan 1976:86). Chapter 8 in this volume provides additional examples from the historical record that document the ability of mission neophytes to continue certain hunting-and-gathering practices well into the mission period in coastal California. In considering the contacts that mission neophytes had to the surrounding landscape, it is important to note that Spanish missions were often pluralistic communities that drew members from wide geographic areas, including indigenous peoples speaking multiple languages and harboring traditional animosities. At some missions, shifts in the recruitment of Native peoples led to generational differences in the composition of neophyte communities as missionizing efforts pushed farther into the colonial hinterlands or as various mission communities were consolidated over time (Arkush 2011; Eaton 1989; Hester 1989; Stojanowski 2005). Recent research has illuminated how families and individuals from diverse backgrounds were able to forge new identities at mission sites (Peelo 2010, 2011). In Baja California, Panich (2010a) employed a mission padrón, or census, from the Dominican mission of Santa Catalina to understand the ethnolinguistic composition of the neophyte community. The document listed individuals with their indigenous clan names, which were then linked to ethnographically known clans to reveal that the neophyte population at Santa Catalina consisted of members of at least twelve geographically distinct clan or lineage groups, whose members spoke a minimum of three languages. The challenge for scholars interested in such issues is to tease out the connections members of these diverse, multiethnic communities may have maintained to their respective homelands.

Seeing Mission-Period Sites in the Colonial Hinterland The focus on missions as the centerpiece of the tripartite system of colonial institutions—missions, presidios, and pueblos— employed by the Spanish has overshadowed the wide range of sites that can add to our understanding of how Native people negotiated Spanish colonialism. Whereas the over two hundred missions that were founded in La Florida, Texas, the Southwest, and the Californias offer excellent comparative potential (Aviles and Hoover 1997; Tomka and Perttula 2011), we must also consider the various ranchos, estancias, visitas, and asistencias that filled in the landscape around and between mission headquarters. Ranches and estancias in particular were home to significant numbers of Native laborers and occasionally included a mission station (visita) and chapel (asistencia) (Costello and Hornbeck 1989:312–13). As

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Milanich (1999) describes for La Florida, ranches were established early in the colonization of the region for profit and to supply the colony. In the case of La Chua ranch, the acquisition of land for the ranch required first obtaining permission from the land’s owner—the chief of the San Martín de Ayacuto village—and then offerings of gifts and feasts (Milanich 1999:154). At Pecos Pueblo in the American Southwest, friars were not allowed to reside at the main pueblo and had to negotiate for small plots of land for their conventos (Wilcox 2009). In California, the herding and agricultural activities of Mission San Gabriel, near Los Angeles, were spread across as many as thirty-two ranchos (Phillips 1975:26–27). Mission San Francisco in Alta California had as many as eight outposts and ranchos scattered throughout its hinterland, one of which— San Pedro y San Pablo—was founded at a key crossroads for local Ohlone people and had a population that at times rivaled other full-fledged missions (Dietz et al. 1979). Although limited archaeological work has focused on mission-era ranches and other outposts, systematic investigation of such sites is still rare. In addition to the numerous settlements and outposts established by mission authorities, other kinds of indigenous sites date to the mission period and could provide important details regarding the lives of indigenous people. In many regions of the Borderlands, Spanish missionaries hoped to relocate indigenous converts to centralized mission establishments; these ideal policies of reducción or congregación, however, were variable according to time and place. In the central and southern portions of Baja California, Jesuit missionaries struggled to support large neophyte populations at the head missions, or cabeceras. Instead, they reluctantly allowed local Native populations to reside in outlying rancherias (Crosby 1994:197–98). Native people living in such locations were likely able to retain and assert many of the kinds of social and subsistence practices that were targeted for elimination at other mission sites (Wade 2008:133). A similar situation existed in colonial La Florida, where reducción was not systematically implemented. Native villages existed side by side with missions, which often included visitas, or smaller missions intended to be placed in chiefdoms where religious doctrine was taught usually by a single friar (Milanich 1999:111; Saunders 1998:405). A policy of reducción was more easily realized in Alta California, although its application varied within the province. Franciscan missionaries at the two southernmost missions— San Diego and San Luis Rey—allowed mission neophytes to live in their home villages, requiring residence at the mission only for a few weeks out of the year (Hackel 2005:85; Lightfoot 2005:65). In many areas, scholars have traditionally believed that the synergistic effects of the missionaries’ relocation program, the ecological effects of intro-

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duced plants and animals, and/or the spread of infectious disease hindered Native peoples’ access to and engagement with broader social and physical landscapes, but new research is suggesting that Native peoples may have retained stronger ties to their homelands than previously thought. In the American Southwest, Cochiti oral histories recount the Pueblos moving their dances and ceremonies into the hinterlands away from the watchful eyes of the missionaries (Wilcox 2009:135). An account from Mission Nuestra Señora del Espíritu Santo de Zúñiga in south-central Texas states that “when the ministers are careless [the Indians] go off to the woods to dance . . . even though they are punished for it” (Kress 1931:47). The historical record from California provides similar examples. Missionaries from San Buenaventura and Santa Barbara wrote of the neophytes’ frequent communication, “relationships, dealings and intercourse with the pagans” (Geiger and Meighan 1976:39). And writing in 1801, Fermín Francisco de Lasuén, father president of the Franciscan missions in Alta California, wrote of Native peoples’ desire to occasionally leave the missions: “If we absolutely denied them the right to go to the mountains, I am afraid that they would riot” (qtd. in Hackel 2005:84). Archaeological investigations in colonial hinterlands have identified enduring relationships between Native peoples and their ancestral landscapes, as well as newly formed linkages between colonies and Native villages (Lightfoot et al. 2009). This work also addresses cultural persistence and innovation at points of refuge in the Spanish hinterland (Bernard 2008; see also chapter 9, this volume) and the long-term use and reuse of culturally significant places by Indians on approved or illicit departure from missions (Schneider 2010). Another significant development has been the recognition in Alta California of the system of paseo, or approved leaves of absence, in which missionaries granted able-bodied neophytes furloughs totaling between five and ten weeks a year (Sandos 2004:199). Originating from a practical means to differentiate unbaptized Indians and neophytes outside of missions (Milliken 1995:95), paseo was also an opportunity for neophytes to maintain access to local food resources, family, marriage and burial customs, and socially significant places on the landscape (Arkush 2011; Newell 2009; Schneider 2010:164–68). In sum, it was one mechanism by which missions’ Native inhabitants straddled colonial and indigenous worlds, maintained connections to some cultural practices, and modified other practices to suit the needs of the time. With the practice of paseo, one wonders where neophytes went— did they return to familiar villages, venture to new hunting and gathering areas, or withdraw to hidden places to carry out forbidden social practices? The continued (re)use of indigenous villages since contact challenges temporal schema that neatly divide prehistoric, protohistoric, colonial, and historic time periods, as well as

18

Introduction

traditional methodological divisions that structure the study of Native sites and materials dating to the colonial period (Lightfoot 1995). In contrast to the broad brushstrokes of historical narratives that place missions as the end point of Native American histories, we view the colonial frontiers of North America as places of tribal intermingling, revitalization, and cultural foment. In the hinterlands of Spanish missions—at places of refuge, familiar villages, and other locations—Native people convened, integrated new material forms and customs, and held tightly to the practices of their predecessors. Residential mobility and the creation of refugee sites enabled Pueblo groups from different material, linguistic, and religious traditions to unite and expel Spaniards from colonial New Mexico before and during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (Kulisheck 2003; Wilcox 2009:19), while the Big Thicket of East Texas formed a cultural and physical buffer between the Koasati and Spanish, French, Mexican, and American colonists (Perttula 1994). In Spanish Florida and Georgia, the inhabitants of scattered refuge encampments and isolated mission-era Guale villages rejected colonial materials and embraced precontact pottery traditions (Saunders 1998). At the colony of St. Augustine, Florida, the adjacent Mission Nombre de Dios (founded in 1565) had by 1759 transformed into an “Indian town” consisting of Indian refugees from other missions, as well as enslaved African runaways from southeastern plantations (Milanich 1999:194). At other composite Indian communities, innovative material traditions and retooled social arrangements challenge ideas of cultural loss and are instructive of the complexities of racial identification during and long after the era of Spanish missions (Panich 2010a; Peelo 2010, 2011; Schneider 2010:175).

Indigenous Agency on Colonial Frontiers There is no question that the missions of the Spanish Borderlands were the scene of intimate contacts between Native Americans and European colonists. Missions were designed from the outset to be the location of encounter, the places where the Old World met the New World and where indigenous peoples would be transformed into European peasants loyal to the Crown. The nature of the encounters that took place within the mission walls has fascinated generations of historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and others. Indeed, the modern landscapes of California, Florida, and Texas—three of the most densely populated states in the United States—are palimpsests of missions with original sites overlain with a succession of mission-inspired architectural styles and place-names that allude to a colonial past (Thomas

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1991c). Yet for all the celebration of missions in the landscapes of New Spain, little attention has been paid to the ways in which Spanish mission sites were incorporated into the cultural landscapes of the indigenous people who called these places home. This volume is but one attempt to analyze the creative social actions of indigenous groups during the colonial period and long after missions had come and gone. By highlighting Native agency in Spanish missions—often portrayed as the most repressive of colonial institutions—we aim to stimulate conversation about how indigenous people negotiated colonialism more broadly. As many scholars have shown, colonial borderlands are complex, socially charged places that are continuously negotiated, transformed, and recontextualized by the people inhabiting them (Adelman and Aron 1999; Lightfoot and Martinez 1995; Thomas 1989a). An overemphasis on institutional histories restricts mission archaeology to a top-down study of social dynamics on the colonial frontier, thereby privileging European subjects and leaving Native people in the background despite the fact that they constituted a resident majority over the handful of European missionaries and mestizo soldiers stationed at mission sites. To paraphrase Lightfoot and Martinez (1995:473), one person’s frontier is another person’s homeland. It is worth reexamining missions as just one component within a broader interconnected network of villages, refuge sites, and colonial settlements spanning proximal zones, hinterlands, and the interspaces outside the control of colonial powers (Lightfoot et al. 2009). Missionization was not simply the construction of mission complexes but also a process in which historically situated strategies, practices, and relationships were articulated by many agents in a range of social contexts (Lycett 2002). The lively scholarly dialogue examining indigenous agency has laid the groundwork for ethnohistorical and archaeological studies of Spanish missions and their hinterlands that offer nuanced understandings of the role of Spanish missions in the broader Native landscape, as well as in the long-term context of indigenous cultures and histories (see chapter 5, this volume). Radding (1997), for example, examines the historical trajectories of Native peoples in Sonora, highlighting the dynamic connections that families and individuals had to various indigenous cultural traditions and colonial enterprises. Archaeological work in the Californias, in particular, has examined the legacies of colonialism for Native communities by chronicling how Native identities and practices were perpetuated even as they were transformed during the colonial period and its aftermath (Lightfoot 2005; Panich 2010a; Peelo 2010; Skowronek 1998). The diverse rates of cultural interaction represented in the Spanish Borderlands, resulting in both short- and long-term engagements, as well as the variable success of mission establishments across this broad region, complicate the

20

Introduction

traditional narratives of conquest and open spaces for considering Native persistence (Costello 1989; Van Buren 2010:167–69). Yet the binding power of colonial narratives of dominance continues to affect the cultural heritage, as well as political and economic status, of indigenous groups around the world. In North America, the tenacity of such ideas is most readily evidenced in “terminal narratives,” which are accounts of Native American histories that culminate in cultural extinction and reinforce the effectiveness of colonialism (Wilcox 2009). Narratives of European conquest, demographic collapse, village abandonment, and cultural assimilation have serious implications for modern indigenous groups, as they extend beyond scholarly discourse into the realms of governmental policies and public opinion (Dartt-Newton 2011; Field et al. 1992; Gallivan et al. 2011; Lightfoot 2005; Lightfoot et al. 2013; Mrozowski et al. 2009). As meeting points of Native and European histories, the study of missions and related sites necessitates long-term, collaborative partnerships between researchers and descendant communities, as well as the use of refined field techniques, laboratory methods, classificatory schema, and theoretical approaches that acknowledge multilinear models of culture change and persistence (see, e.g., Liebmann 2012). Such approaches will ideally facilitate the contextualization of missions’ indigenous histories and help to break down essentialist notions of cultural loss and authenticity that often hinge on the transformations of the colonial period (Panich 2013). Understanding Native agency on colonial frontiers is not limited to mission studies (Scheiber and Mitchell 2010), nor is it relevant only to North America. The themes explored in this volume are also informed by scholarship examining mission sites in other regions of the world, including Central and South America, Africa, and Australia, where the involvement of different religious orders, goals, and participants contributed to unique colonial legacies despite an overarching connection to European colonial expansion (e.g., Comaroff and Comaroff 1991; Van Buren 2010). Research in Australia, in particular, has highlighted the role of mission establishments within the broader indigenous landscape. Lydon (2009), for example, examines materiality, spatial order, and social memory at Ebenezer mission (a Moravian outpost), and Birmingham (2000) analyzes hunter-gatherer mobility at the Lutheran mission of Killalpaninna, which was integrated into a seasonal round as an optimizing strategy to reduce risks associated with procuring food and raw materials throughout the year. These studies speak to the interpretive potential of contextualizing colonialism within preexisting social arrangements such as indigenous settlement and subsistence routines (and see Lydon and Ash 2010). In joining this global conversation on the place of colonialism in indigenous

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histories and landscapes, we hope the perspectives collected in this volume will also be useful to scholars in other areas of the world.

Conclusion As the foregoing examples attest, archaeologists are well positioned to marshal multiple lines of evidence to understand Native negotiations of colonialism. In reviewing the literature on the Spanish Borderlands, we highlight the themes of power, external connections, and use of colonial hinterlands by indigenous people. In thinking about power, we reject the idea of the colonial period as a context solely for European domination, but we also question approaches that limit Native agency to active or passive resistance to the mission system. While locating acts of defiance within mission compounds is one entry point for examining the “indigenous perspective” at Spanish colonies, the actions of neophytes remain embedded within contexts of colonial dominance. Even revisionary descriptions of mission life continue to emphasize missions as authoritarian institutions where few Native American groups survived with their cultures intact. Without diminishing some of the darkest examples of colonial brutality enacted against Native Americans (e.g., Saunt 2010), we fear that an overextended search for resistance in nearly every part of daily life is counterproductive and only serves to reinforce the idea of a bounded, carceral mission landscape. In considering the creative ways in which Indians accepted, modified, or refused introduced social practices, we believe that it may be useful to turn mission studies inside out. When viewed from the context of Native societies (rather than solely from the context of Euro-American colonialism), missions are more than just places of domination, disease, and cultural extinction. Instead, we may be able to tease out stories of accommodation, co-optation, and persistence that defy the image of Native people as either docile converts or the broken remnants of disappearing cultures. This is not to deny the very real demographic and cultural consequences of colonization but to suggest that the archaeology of Spanish missions and their associated outstations, as well as contemporaneous sites in the colonial hinterland, may offer a more nuanced and holistic view of how indigenous people actively negotiated the new colonial worlds that were thrust upon them. Missions, in our view, cannot be understood without reference to the broader indigenous landscape and outlying places that surrounded, contextualized, and constantly shaped them. The archaeology of mission sites need not be mission-centric or rehash institutional histories devoid of the indigenous

22

Introduction

groups who built the missions; instead, it can identify and trace the ways that neophytes engaged in broader indigenous social and material networks. Similarly, we know from the rich ethnohistorical record of colonial North America that vast hinterlands existed external to individual mission sites, including a continuum of sites from places of refuge to colonial outstations. Such sites challenge fixed categories of “European” and “Native American” and also compel us to consider the ways Native people made their lives at the margins of the Spanish empire. It is our belief that in looking closely at the interspaces between colonial footholds, the places to which Native people fled, and the Indianpopulated and operated outstations, new research questions and cooperative field projects will surely emerge. To fully understand the role of Spanish colonialism in context of indigenous histories requires looking beyond the mission edifice. In some cases, this may force us to read archival documents for information that reveals the contested political landscapes outside the mission quadrangle, and in others, it may mean reanalyzing archaeological assemblages from mission sites for evidence of external connections; it may also require revised methodologies to make visible places of refuge and other Native communities in the colonial hinterland. We are not the first to advocate such a reorientation. In her review article on mission archaeology, Graham (1998:26) suggests that archaeologists interested in understanding the mission experience must look outward to “communities with only visita churches; to mission communities with limited resources and permeable boundaries; to the full range of Indian settlements, both Christian and non-Christian; and to colonial communities as well.” We wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, and in organizing this volume, we hope to highlight recent research in the Spanish Borderlands that pushes at the boundaries of mission archaeology in order to ignite further conversation on how various Native American groups actively negotiated Spanish colonialism. Spanish missions were founded not just on the margins of empire but often at the core of complex and dynamic indigenous cultural landscapes.

Part I Power, Politics, and Belief

2 The Guale Uprising of 1597 An Archaeological Perspective from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (Georgia)

Elliot H. Blair and David Hurst Thomas

Franciscan missions provided a primary instrument for territorial conquest and stability across the Spanish Borderlands, which stretched from St. Augustine (Florida) westward to San Francisco (California). But the mission effort across the Borderlands in America has received decidedly mixed reviews. One story emerges from the American Southwest, where the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 targeted Franciscan friars as lightning rods of indigenous discontent (Liebmann 2012; Weber 1999; Wilcox 2009). Spanish survivors sometimes suggested that destroying the churches, burning and breaking the most sacred Franciscan symbols, and killing defenseless friars was a violent, public rejection of Christianity, with perhaps metaphysical connections to the devil. Indigenous leaders have said that such rebellion-against-the-cross was a blow for religious freedom, a reaction to Franciscan efforts to quash traditional religious beliefs. They accused the missions of bringing disease, famine, and drought. When the Franciscan god failed to bring rain or heal the sick or keep enemies at bay, indigenous people took a revitalistic path stressing old religions and a return of the ancestral spirits. Pueblo historians have recently called this uprising the “first American revolution” (Sando and Agoyo 2005). A very different picture comes from Spanish Florida, where sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Franciscan friars argued that their success in controlling the Indians made them an indispensable instrument of frontier defense, sometimes far superior to military personnel. Fray Francisco Pareja, a Franciscan stationed for years at Mission San Juan del Puerto, boasted that “we [Franciscans] are the ones who are conquering and subduing the land” (Milanich and 25

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Power, Politics, and Belief

Sturtevant 1972:14; Oré 1936:107). Fray Pareja claimed that he and his colleagues not only influenced religious and social conduct but also acted as primary agents for establishing new settlements, directing the construction of new defensive installations, and determining the focus of agrarian policy across the Borderlands. Ethnohistorian John Worth (2013a:138) has suggested that Franciscan friars stationed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century La Florida can best be characterized as “a sort of colonial-era version of the modern U.S. Peace Corps, seeking and gaining voluntary admittance in Native American societies with the express purpose of disseminating, teaching, and exemplifying what they offered as a better way of life within the context of the new colonial world.” Paradoxically, these opposing interpretations from distant regions of the Borderlands are both true. This chapter examines the social context and the long-term trajectories of the 1597 Guale rebellion in Spanish Florida, utilizing the newest documentary evidence of internal conflict to explore the implications for Guale social relationships during the following century from the archaeological perspective of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. New ethnohistorical evidence raises compelling questions and challenges for the archaeologist examining the material record of Franciscan missions along the Georgia Bight and far beyond. No longer can indigenous southeastern Indians be viewed simply as passive victims of conquest; beyond doubt, the Guale and other Native groups were active players in helping to establish and govern the mission system that spread across Spanish Florida during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In addition to raising questions of agency in colonial settings (Thomas 2010) and challenging traditional understandings of power relationships among colonized and colonizer, this new perspective also sheds light on the political and social structure of the colonized indigenous chiefdoms (Kole 2009). By emphasizing the diversity of goals and interests found within the mission provinces and indigenous communities—a central theme found throughout this volume—the multiple histories of colonized peoples can be explored in nuanced ways, enabling new considerations of how Native and Spanish interests collide and overlap. The so-called Juanillo Rebellion of 1597 has long been viewed as an Atlantic coastal precursor of the southwestern Pueblo Revolt of 1680—an indigenous revolt against Spanish colonial repression that resulted in the deaths of five Franciscan friars (two at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale). Indeed, most of the secondary literature (Gannon 1965; Geiger 1937; Hoffman 2002; Lanning 1935) paints “the revolt as a response to Franciscan interference in Guale affairs and missionary opposition to the practice of polygamy” (Francis and Kole 2011:51). Even revisionist and postcolonial approaches to Native

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American colonial histories emphasize rebellion and resistance as the primary Native responses to Spanish brutality and oppression (e.g., Mann and Grinde 2001). By contrast, the recent Murder and Martyrdom in Spanish Florida (Francis and Kole 2011) argues that the Juanillo Rebellion was more about factional competition among Guale elites than about active resistance against Spanish colonial powers; in their words, it is a “a story of intense competition, fierce rivalries, and power struggles between various southeastern chiefdoms. What unfolds is a complex web of shifting alliances, political competition and intrigue, as well as violence” (48). As it turns out, the 1597 rebellion was neither anti-Spanish nor even anti-Catholic, and it never aimed to expel the Spanish from Florida. This case study has critical implications for an archaeology of colonialism and resonates with Lightfoot and Martinez’s (1995:483) argument that “cultural transformations may result because of the dynamic interplay of segmentary or factional groups that cross-cut traditionally defined boundaries between ethnic groups.” By focusing upon the factional interests of diverse players within the colonial enterprise, and not intrinsically interpreting all acts of violence as outcomes of the interplay between oppression and resistance, we argue that the new interpretation of the 1597 rebellion provides a platform for asking new questions of the archaeological record of La Florida and examining both the short- and long-term historical trajectories of the diverse Guale people living at Mission Santa Catalina.

The Mississippian Context The 1539–41 de Soto expedition encountered a heavily hierarchical Mississippian society, grounded in long-standing traditions of hereditary birthright. The dominants of this society belonged to a privileged chiefly class enjoying great status and wealth. Mississippian subordinates supplied the labor and material resources to underwrite this hereditary inequality and in the case of the conscripted draft risked their lives in chiefly warfare. Inequality exists in all societies (typically based on gender, age, charisma, and achievement), but the hierarchical Mississippian world was characterized by social status ascribed at birth (almost certainly reckoned as genealogical distance from a single noble ancestor), by permanent leadership apart from (and imposed upon) kin-based structures, and by the ability to secure the labor of increasing numbers of nonkin for various communal activities. Mississippian farmers and foragers alike participated in intense status competition

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and rivalry, formed restricted-access information-sharing groups, recognized kin-group land tenure, understood intragroup variation in frequency/quantity of sharing, and differentially targeted recipients of shared resources. The Mississippian elite acquired greater status and wealth by manipulating social, economic, and political relationships to their benefit, by controlling the flow of cultural items that signal status, by monopolizing the labor of others, and by creating ideologies that justified the inequitable distribution of wealth and power. For their part, dominants realized the benefits of controlling and redistributing food resources, extracting their own fitness-related benefit in increasingly disproportionate amounts. The paramounts maintained a largescale, regional perspective and traveled extensively to conduct war, diplomacy, and ritual and to participate in complex, rank-enhancing marriage alliances. Mississippian micos held important offices in the political and religious hierarchies, with tangible social, political, and economic advantages. Mississippian subordinates supported the paramounts and themselves by farming and foraging (often both). Subordinates provided virtually all the elite subsistence and luxury goods—tending the chiefly cornfields and fish weirs, gathering and shucking the chiefly oysters, hickory nuts, and acorns, building and paddling the chiefly canoes, and waging war against the chiefly enemies. In short, Mississippian commoners supplied the labor, produced the chiefly wealth, and participated in chiefly warfare. Hardly strangers to inherited inequality, the Spanish newcomers intrinsically understood how hierarchies operate—with negotiations proceeding between paramounts; everyone else was expected to follow orders. It was almost as if Mississippian society was “preadapted” to the Spanish colonial system imported to the deep American South in the sixteenth century.

The Mission Context In 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established La Florida as a strategic Spanish foothold to stave off further French settlements and to safeguard the Fleet of the Indies through the Bahama Channel as the treasure-laden ships sailed back to Spain. This strategic significance ultimately ensured a relatively stable source of royal funding, but it also required that Spanish colonists in St. Augustine rely heavily on local Native American populations to buffer against interruptions in external supply lines. The Spanish were thus forced to rely heavily on the human and natural riches of La Florida. Because both slavery and abusive treatment of indigenous people had been explicitly banned,

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Menéndez de Avilés and his successors were constrained to ensuring good treatment for indigenous peoples, acting with explicit permission from all Native leaders. Europeans living in Spanish Florida became active participants in indigenous political dynamics, bolstering and reinforcing the political power of traditional Indian leaders. Hereditary chiefs retained considerable internal autonomy over secular matters and ruled using traditional lines of authority (Worth 2002). Amy Turner Bushnell has long argued that the mission in Spanish Florida “was no theocracy. It was a fully functioning Native town governed by an interlocking set of hereditary and elected native leaders” (1994:28). As mentioned above, John Worth (2013a) takes this argument much further to suggest that Franciscan friars stationed in La Florida functioned like the modern Peace Corps, being granted voluntary admittance into Native American communities to assist in the transition to the new colonial world (see esp. Worth 2002, 2004a, 2009a, 2013a, 2013b). To be sure, Franciscan missionaries functioned as religious practitioners, but only within the context of chiefly authority, continuing the practice of indigenous Mississippian religious specialists in existence long before the arrival of the Spanish. The friars also assumed new roles in the hybrid, colonial context of La Florida, operating as cultural facilitators who bridged the chasm separating the realities of pre-Columbian and colonial Spanish practice. Resident friars assumed economic responsibilities (especially involving intensified agricultural production), negotiated new roles for the military, and interceded at times on behalf of the mission Indians, often shoring up traditional Mississippian hierarchies. Such support was critical. Mississippian chiefdoms have long been recognized as relatively unstable political entities characterized by warfare, competition, and internal strife (e.g., Beck 2003; Blitz 1999, 2010; Ethridge 2010). Referring to “cycling” as characterizing the sociopolitical change accompanying such inter- and intrachiefdom conflict, Anderson (1994a, 1994b, 1996; see also Gavrilets et al. 2010) identifies a number of factors underlying such political instability and change—importantly including factional competition (see also Brumfiel 1995; Brumfiel and Fox 2003; Helms 1994). The Spanish strategy in La Florida empowered provincial chiefs to accept (and likewise reject) the presence of Franciscan friars, with military personnel no longer living in the missions. Hereditary chiefs maintained secular authority, and, beyond their religious responsibilities, priests assumed the role of cultural broker between the community and the Spanish bureaucracy—marking the beginnings of the so-called Peace Corps role for Franciscans in La Florida (Worth 2013a). By accepting conversion to Christianity and accepting resident Franciscan friars into

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the local community’s jurisdiction, Native chiefs could retain (and also gain and augment) authority reckoned through ancient Mississippian hereditary bloodlines, while still drawing upon the largesse of the Catholic Church and the Spanish Crown. Simply stated, then, the colonial Spanish system in La Florida reinforced internal chiefly power by providing a tributary exchange system in which access to indigenous land and labor was channeled through hereditary chiefs. Specifically, by trading in the external, colonial Spanish market, traditional Guale leaders transformed agricultural surpluses, land, and labor—all commodities under their chiefly control—thereby assuring military backing and continuing the long-term traditional practices of ostentatious public display. “In effect, Spanish Florida became a sort of modified paramount chiefdom through which the chiefly matrilineages of destabilized chiefdoms bolstered their own internal power by subordinating themselves to the Spanish crown” (Worth 2002:46). By pledging allegiance and obedience to Spanish officials, indigenous Timucua, Mocama, and Guale chiefs annexed a powerful military ally in the Spanish garrison at St. Augustine. The seventeenth-century economy of Spanish Florida evolved into an exchange network through which Native populations channeled their surplus food (primarily maize) and labor into colonial St. Augustine. These Native paramounts not only generated a new market for their agricultural surplus but also gained access to new tools and technologies to improve their yield. Converting their surpluses into symbolically important Spanish goods such as cloth, tools, and beads, the caciques positioned themselves to receive tribute from both the Spaniards and their own people. In this way, the paramount chiefs of La Florida competed with one another to enter into the mission system (Worth 1998a). By courting the Hispanic newcomers, indigenous leaders found a way to continue their Mississippian heritage of using ostentatious displays of wealth and status items to reinforce their hereditary status (Hall 2007, 2009). Oddly enough, the Franciscan mission system provided a way to project past lifeways into the uncertain future.

The Events of 1597 The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Franciscan Peace Corps provided powerful cultural brokers, respected within the Spanish community but fully capable of lobbying for Native interests when necessary vis-à-vis Spanish military and secular authorities. But as in New Mexico, Franciscan blood was still shed in the missions of Spanish Florida.

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In 1597 the Spanish province of Guale (situated between the Ogeechee and Altamaha Rivers)—as well as the more northern province of Santa Elena (Orista/Escamacu, centered around Parris Island, South Carolina)1 and other enigmatic groups from the Georgia coast (figure 2.1), such as the Salchiches, whose political and social relationship to the Guale is not well understood— erupted in armed insurrection, killing five of the six friars stationed in the province and razing most of the doctrinas established along the coast. Most histories of the rebellion, based almost entirely upon the noneyewitness account of the Franciscan friar Luis Geronimo de Oré (1936), argue that the rebellion was instigated by the heir to the title of mico mayor (paramount chief) of Tolomato (the principal town within the chiefdom of Guale) named don Juanillo. The commonly accepted explanation for this event was that the Franciscan friars provoked this attack by attempting to end polygamous practices and by trying to subvert don Juanillo’s right to inherit the title of mico mayor from his uncle don Francisco, the current mico mayor of Tolomato. Following the attack, the lone surviving friar, Fray Ávila, was held captive at the Salchiche town of Tulufina until being ransomed by the Spanish ten months later.2 The rebellion was finally “resolved” once most of the principal Native leaders again rendered obedience to the Spanish Crown in St. Augustine, and an indigenous force, led by don Domingo of Asao and composed of warriors from Guale, La Tama, and the Salchiches, killed don Juanillo and don Francisco during a battle at the inland site of Yfusinique in 1601 (Francis and Kole 2011:137–38, table 8). In their new interpretation of this series of events, Francis and Kole (2011) identify a number of ambiguities and paradoxes in this standard interpretation of the rebellion. First, they point out that in addition to the killing of five of the friars in Guale, the revolt also included an attack by a force of Guale Indians (led by don Domingo of Asao) on Mission San Pedro (Cumberland Island) in the province of Mocama to the south of Guale. But they note that this attack was directed entirely against the local Native inhabitants, rather than the resident Franciscans. Second, they note that during the Spanish investigation of the attacks, differential destruction of the Guale towns involved in the rebellion was observed. That is, in some Guale settlements not only were the Spanish church and friary burned, but the town council house and chief’s residence were also burned (e.g., Tolomato). In other Guale towns

1. Here we follow Francis and Kole (2011) for the spelling of most of the Native towns and chiefdoms mentioned in the text. 2. Francis and Kole (2011) note that Tulufina was the town where Fray Ávila was first stationed when he arrived in La Florida.

Figure 2.1. Map showing the locations of Spanish provinces and Native towns mentioned in the text. Locational information and dates of occupation are synthesized from Francis and Kole (2011), Green et al. (2002), Jones (1978), and Worth (1995b, 2004a, 2004b, 2009a).

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neither Spanish nor indigenous buildings had been destroyed (e.g., Asao). As they astutely ask, why would a community rebelling against the Spanish destroy their own council house? Finally, they note that while early (ca. 1597– 1598) accounts of the revolt seem to implicate don Domingo of Asao as one of the primary instigators, later documentation (ca. 1601) assigns the blame entirely to don Francisco and don Juanillo—the mico mayor and his heir—from Tolomato. Don Domingo subsequently becomes the one responsible for organizing the war party, charged with tracking down the perpetrators, that kills don Francisco and don Juanillo. Afterward he emerges as the new mico mayor of Guale territory (with Santo Domingo de Asao becoming the new principal town). Francis and Kole (2011) argue that these complications to the traditional narrative of the 1597 Juanillo Rebellion clearly indicate that an antiFranciscan or anti-Spanish explanation for the rebellion is unwarranted, or at least only a minor motive among others. Additionally, they suggest that don Domingo from Asao is the most important protagonist of the revolt and that a combination of his personal goals and ambitions and factional strife and competition among and between the Guale and neighboring chiefdoms (e.g., Orista/Escamacu, Mocama, Salchiches) is one of the most plausible primary explanations for the rebellion.

Rebellions Beyond 1597 The 1597 uprising is the best known, but at least six other rebellions took place in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century missions of Spanish Florida. Most previous historiographies have long interpreted each uprising (again, like the Pueblo Revolt of 1680) as Native resistance against unwarranted and unwanted Spanish authority. Contemporary archival research indicates that most (if not all) of these “rebellions” actually reflect warfare and competition between Mississippian-style chiefdoms, each vying for power, access, alliance, and tribute obligations from Spanish St. Augustine. For example, documentary research by John Worth (1992a, 1992b, 1998b) on the 1656 Timucuan rebellion shows that this insurrection was not a sweeping attack against all Spaniards and Spanish institutions (cf. Pearson 1983). Instead, it was directly targeted against Spanish soldiers and the civil government of La Florida; no friars were attacked or killed during the revolt. The revolt itself seems to have been in response to two primary factors: the reduction in gift giving from St. Augustine to the caciques of Timucua by the current governor, Diego de Rebolledo, who also provoked the attack by ordering the caciques, along with their followers, to personally carry their individual rations of maize to

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St. Augustine in order to sustain them as they served in the militia. Worth clearly shows that both of these actions were a direct affront to chiefly authority. To lose access to nonlocal prestige goods, as well as to be seen performing menial tasks, such as burden bearing, would cause the caciques to lose prestige and hence their ability to lead their subordinates (cf. Borgen 2011). While significantly different from the 1597 revolt—where only friars were targeted— the basic underlying causes seem to be quite similar. Namely, both were a struggle over the ability of individual chiefs to maintain and acquire authority within the colonial system. Similarly, an earlier revolt in 1576 in the provinces of Guale and Santa Elena seems to have been due to many of the same underlying causes. Though this revolt has not received a complete documentary examination (Francis and Kole 2011:25), based on the extant secondary historiography several factors emerge as catalysts and causes. These include Governor Hernando de Miranda’s cessation of gift giving to the Guale and Escamacu caciques and his approval of abusive treatment of them (Held 1949; Lyon 1984, 1987, 1992), Spanish interference into internal indigenous conflicts over chiefly succession (Francis and Kole 2011), and Spanish demands for excessive maize tribute (Jones 1978:182). Additionally, both during and following the rebellion, French corsairs appeared on the Georgia coast seeking both to form anti-Spanish alliances with the Native peoples and to trade for sassafras (Bushnell 1994:63, 65–66; Magnaghi 1997; Paar 1999; Ross 1923:275, 280; Ross 1924; Worth 2009a:183). This seems to have exacerbated preexisting factional conflict, with some towns (e.g., Tolomato in Guale and Guadalquini in Mocama) 3 welcoming the French and rebuffing the Spanish and others refusing to engage with them. While conflict between pro- and anti-French factions does not appear to have been a major factor in the later 1597 rebellion (Francis and Kole 2011; Hoffman 2002:347, n. 28; Kole 2009), Bushnell (1994) argues that it continued to be a source of conflict. Following the resolution of the 1597 revolt, Bushnell (1994:68, citing Ybarra 1605; see also Ross 1924:185) argues that the “people of Satuache took up arms against the cacique of Guale over the issue of trade with the French, who continued to visit their harbors long after the ill-fated Ais and Guale rebellions. Without this trade, they claimed, they could not survive.” Continuing, Bushnell argues that “the factions of Guale’s civil war were still alive and would remain troublesome until the French ceased to visit the province for sassafras around 1610” (69). It is possible that this also explains the poorly documented 1608 Guale conflict (Hoffman 2002:98; Jones 3. See Ashley et al. (2013) for a thorough discussion of the sociopolitical and ethnic affiliation of Guadalquini.

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1978:185–86, n. 34; Lanning 1935:160–61; Swanton 1922:89), in which only five of the Guale caciques are implicated in internal strife. Yet another rebellion is documented in Guale in 1645, and though few details are available regarding its causes, it too seems to be related to internal sociopolitical conflicts rather than being an anti-Spanish action (Swanton 1922:89; Swanton 1946:135).

Implications and Long-term Trajectories These well-documented instances of factional competition and internecine warfare have important implications for how we approach the archaeology of this region. As discussed above, we have long known that internal conflict and warfare were endemic to Mississippian chiefdoms (Anderson 1994b; Beck 2003; Blitz 1999, 2010; DePratter 1991a; Dye 2009; Ethridge 2010) and that such conflict is also well documented in, and perhaps exacerbated by, colonial situations (e.g., Hassig 1974; McCafferty 2000; Richter 1985; Scarry and Maxham 2002; Waselkov 1993; Wesson 2010). However, many discussions of factional competition and warfare focus primarily upon its role in political change and evolution (e.g., Anderson 1994a, 1994b, 1996; Brumfiel and Fox 2003; Carneiro 1992). However, if we consider factional politics from a historical rather than an evolutionary perspective, then we can utilize our archaeological data to document the long-term trajectories of the social relationships of individuals and groups. Rather than being evidence of structural factors affecting the evolution of sociopolitical complexity, factional strife and internecine warfare are also specific examples of conflict that have longterm social repercussions and material outcomes. That is, factional competition has substantive impacts upon the lives of individuals, affecting the relationships among individuals and communities. To phrase it another way, in contrast to considering how factional competition affects sociopolitical structure along a vertical axis (e.g., cycling between complex and simple chiefdoms), a horizontal, historical approach looking at specific examples of social fissioning and fusing (e.g., Blitz 1999) considers how groups and communities interact on both a short- and long-term basis. This is readily apparent when we examine the period beginning in 1661, labeled by Worth (2009a:18) as one of retreat and abandonment, where the Spanish mission communities of La Florida simultaneously moved from the mainland to the barrier islands of the Georgia Bight and southward toward St. Augustine. He has described this process in great detail (Worth 1995b, 2009a, 2009b); here we provide only a brief sketch of it, highlighting those

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population movements, relocations, and aggregations specifically affecting Mission Santa Catalina. In 1659 a group of exiled Erie Indians (also referred to as Richehecrians, Chichemecos, and ultimately the Westo) emigrated to Georgia (from the Lake Erie region by way of Virginia)—first to the piedmont and the province of La Tama, and later to the falls region of the Savannah River (Bowne 2000, 2005; Gallay 2003; Oatis 2004). The group, in conjunction with British slave traders, carried out a series of destructive raids against the coastal Spanish missions, resulting in a process of population aggregation on the coastal barrier islands. This includes the relocation of San Diego de Satuache mission from a mainland location, likely in the vicinity of the mouth of the Ogeechee River 4 (Worth 1995b:190–91), to Santa Catalina de Guale on St. Catherines Island (ca. 1663–1666) and the aggregation of Santa Clara de Tupiqui and San Joseph de Sapala missions on Sapelo Island. All four missions would become a single aggregate community in 1680 on Sapelo Island, before relocating to Amelia Island in 1683–1684 (see chapter 5, this volume). Worth (2002, 2006) has also noted that such population aggregation did not result in the erasure of previous social identities oriented along the lines of town affiliation or lineage; rather, aggregated settlements continued to be identified by the names of all the constituent communities, and the associated chiefly lineages persisted even once aggregated. As Saunders (2001:82–83) has argued, “The primary allegiance and identity of the Guale . . . was with the village that served as the chief’s residence and area ceremonial center . . . [and] it is still unclear from the documents the extent to which the historic Guale considered themselves a coherent group. [The Guale] . . . seemed to have maintained more allegiance to a town . . . than to any larger group.” That is, social identities seem to be primarily linked to what Blitz (1999:583) calls the okla-talwa—the community-level sociopolitical building block of most southeastern chiefdoms. This can be clearly seen in the relocation of the aggregate mission community from Sapelo Island to Amelia Island in 1683– 1684: the four previously aggregated towns did not move at the same time, nor did all occupy the same physical location upon their arrival on Amelia Island (see figure 2.1). One particularly interesting example highlighting this community-level allegiance is found in the 1677–1678 visitation of Captain Antonio de Argüelles to the province of Guale, in which Argüelles comments that the Indians at 4. This location is significant because it is the same location where Francis and Kole (2011:35, map 1) suggest that the Salchiche towns of Ufalague and Tulufina, where Fray Ávila was held captive during the 1597 rebellion, were located.

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Santa Catalina (on St. Catherines Island) were “passing from one council house to another with slight cause” (Worth 1995b:30, citing Argüelles 1678). Worth suggests that this passage possibly indicates that the Santa Catalina and Satuache communities were reifying their distinctive social identities architecturally through the construction of separate council houses (for an alternative interpretation of this passage, see Pearson 1975). The same Argüelles visitation record also discusses conflict over Native support for the resident Spanish soldiers, with some communities complaining that others were not equally sharing this burden, highlighting some of the tensions and social and political difficulties inherent to the aggregation process (Worth 1995b:30). Other tensions caused by community aggregation include subordinate communities and lineages refusing to provide appropriate tribute to the paramount. It is important to note here that the community aggregating with Mission Santa Catalina in 1663–1666, San Diego de Satuache, is the very same community identified above as having “taken up arms” against the cacique of Guale following the 1597 rebellion (Bushnell 1994:68), and while never named in the sixteenth-century documentary record, Satuache appears to have been located in almost the same location as Tulufina and other Salchiche/Guale towns (Francis and Kole 2011:35, map 1; Worth 1995b:190–91). Indeed, the connection among Tulufina, Satuache, and the Salchiches seems to be quite strong (Worth 2004a). The implication here is that the communities of Santa Catalina de Guale and San Diego de Satuache (along with Tulufina and the Salchiches) had a long history of conflict and competition—both during and before the 1597 rebellion—prior to being forced into an aggregate community in the midseventeenth century. The social implications and archaeological possibilities for this situation are considerable: Are there in fact separate council houses for these two communities, as suggested by Worth (1995b:30)? Did these communities self-segregate into distinct neighborhoods or barrios (Thomas 1987:114)? What evidence is there or for internal diversity and variability within the mission pueblo (Thomas 1993:25)? Are there differences in cuisine across the various sectors of the mission pueblo (Reitz et al. 2010; Thomas 2010)? What role did population aggregation play in the spatial and artifactual variability found in the mission cemetery (Blair et al. 2009)? These and other questions are currently guiding the ongoing research at Mission Santa Catalina. While more work needs to be done to identify archaeological correlates of factional competition (Anderson 1994a:71–75; Brumfiel 1995), and methodological approaches to identifying factional variability in material remains need to be enhanced (see Bowser 2000; Neupert 2000), two tantalizing pieces of evidence strongly suggest patterns of social differentiation within the pueblo at Mission Santa Catalina. The most robust

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evidence comes from the work of Reitz et al. (2010), who have analyzed the distribution of vertebrate fauna at Mission Santa Catalina. Reitz et al. (2010: 153–58) note that, within the pueblo, the neighborhood to the south of the freshwater creek bisecting the site (the so-called Fallen Tree site) had greater access to venison and to high-quality cuts of meat than did the Native people living north of the creek—both to the south and to the north of the mission quadrangle. There were also significant differences in fishing strategies, fish diversity, and trophic-level exploitation among the different regions of the pueblo. Similarly, shell beads and bead blanks occur in significantly greater quantities at Fallen Tree than at other regions of the pueblo, suggesting that the individuals living south of the freshwater creek were engaging in shell bead manufacture more intensively than those in other regions of the pueblo (Blair 2009:155; Blair and Francis 2008:760). While there are clearly multiple explanations for such spatial diversity across the pueblo—Reitz et al. (2010) mention the use of different screen sizes, localized activity areas, and social differences (particularly status) as possibilities—social explanations due to episodes of population aggregation are quite possible and intriguing. Another significant historical circumstance emerges when we examine the even longer-term trajectories of Native populations in the region—specifically when we consider the emergence of the multiethnic Yamasee confederacy and its relationship with the constituent chiefdoms of Guale. The Yamasee were a multiethnic confederacy that emerged on the fringes of and within the Spanish mission provinces in direct response to British and Westo slave raids. While the complicated history of the formation of the Yamasee is well covered elsewhere (Crane 1928; Green et al. 2002; Green 1992; McKivergan 1991; Schrager 2001; Sweeney 2003; Worth 1999, 2004b), several details are worth noting. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the Yamasee, settled in the vicinity of Port Royal, South Carolina, were roughly divided into two clusters of towns: the Upper Yamasee and the Lower Yamasee. These towns seem to have different ethnic origins and settlement histories. The Lower Yamasee, consisting of the towns of Altamaha, Okatee, Chechessee, and Euhaw (Yoa),5 are universally considered to be refugees from the interior chiefdoms of the Georgia piedmont (i.e., Altamaha, Ocute, and Ichisi). These groups fled the interior of Georgia in the 1660s (or earlier) in response to Westo slave raiding, before settling among the Guale and Mocama missions as separate, non-Christian communities. These groups then abandoned the Spanish mission provinces in 1683 before settling in South Carolina (Worth 5. The origins of Euhaw are debated, though most suggest it corresponds to the Guale town of Yoa (Worth 2004b:248).

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1999). The Upper Yamasee are primarily of Guale origin and include the towns of Huspah (Ospo), Tulafina (Tulufina), Sadketche (Salchiches/Satuache), Saupalau (Sapala), Soho (Asao/Asajo), and Sapicbay (Tupiqui). Some of these groups (Saupalau, Soho, Sapicbay, and Huspah) are known to have fled the mission provinces in 1684, while others (Euhaw and perhaps Tulafina) did not arrive in South Carolina until 1702 or 1703, following a British raid on the missions on Amelia Island (Worth 2004b:248).6 The Guale origins of many of these Upper Yamasee towns raise several provocative possibilities. First, as Worth (2004b:248) has pointed out, it is likely significant that most of the Upper Yamasee communities and lineages were “associated with the active rebel faction during the 1597 Guale revolt.” While these communities seem to have been drawn from the constituent Guale chiefdoms and lineages comprising Asao-Talaje, Espogache-Tupiqui, and several of the more enigmatic northern Guale chiefdoms and towns (i.e., Tulufina, Salchiches/Satuache, Aluste, and Yoa), no Yamasee communities seem to consist of lineages from the Guale-Tolomato chiefdom—the paramount during the 1597 rebellion. Worth suggests two possibilities to explain this. First, there is a slight probability that these (Upper Yamasee) towns were formed by fugitive Guale who departed the missions after the 1597 revolt and lived hidden in the interior until the initial formation of the Yamasee confederacy in the early 1660s. Second, and more likely, these towns comprised individuals who fled the Spanish missions following a 1684 coastal pirate raid and a 1702 British attack on the Amelia Island missions. If true, this would suggest that the communities involved in well-documented conflict and internecine warfare during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were forced into uneasy aggregate communities during the mid-seventeenth century before cleaving along the very same factional lines in the eighteenth century. This is the fission/fusion process precisely—playing out over roughly 150 years within a colonial context (Blitz 1999).

Conclusion In this chapter we have situated the 1597 Guale rebellion into its long-term historical context. Building on the work of Francis and Kole (2011), we argue that this incident should not be viewed as active indigenous resistance against 6. The possibility that Tulafina was also such a late arrival in South Carolina is suggested because it is documented to have been physically associated with Mission Santa Catalina on Amelia Island until at least 1701 (Worth 1995b:201; 2004a:239).

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colonial oppression; rather, it is a historical event related to structural conditions rooted in the Guale’s precontact Mississippian past and factional competition within and between communities during the early colonial period. It is also a historical event that structured population movements, alliances, and social relationships across Spanish Florida over the next 150 years. We have considered missionization from a broad geographic perspective, examining how regional population movements altered Spanish Florida, as Native peoples chose to enter, exit, and move within the mission provinces. This perspective strongly resonates with the agenda for colonial mission studies detailed in chapter 1 of this volume, in which power relationships and external connections across the colonial landscape are viewed from a Native perspective, revealing “the contested political landscapes outside the mission quadrangle.” We have highlighted the complex processes by which Native agency and colonial power dynamics were structured and note the diverse goals and agendas competing within Guale society. Additionally, we have demonstrated that the long-term ramifications of this event have important implications for how we interrogate the colonial archaeological record both across La Florida and within individual mission communities.

Acknowledgments We thank the Edward John Noble and St. Catherines Island foundations for their long-term support of archaeology on St. Catherines Island. We thank Lee Panich and Tsim Schneider for the invitation to participate both in this volume and in the Society for Historical Archaeology session from which it emerged. We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of John Worth and Michael Francis, both of whom provided helpful comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.

3 Missionization, Negotiation, and Belief The Role of the Acuera Chiefdom in Colonial Seventeenth-Century Florida

Willet A. Boyer III

The editors’ introduction to this volume notes that “the overarching goal . . . is to highlight the agency of Native peoples living in the Spanish Borderlands of North America, where missions were the primary institution of colonization.” I consider this approach to mission studies to be an important shift from past approaches to mission and colonial studies. The experience of missionization of Native American cultures throughout the Americas cannot be understood if viewed simply as the “integration” of such groups into colonial Spanish society. Nor can missionization be understood if viewed, as have some archaeologists and historians, through the lens of “resistance,” or lack thereof, of Native Americans to Spanish cultural norms and practices (Deagan 1990:297–315). While resistance of many Native American groups to missionization clearly took place in many parts of the Americas, viewing the experience of missionization through such a lens leads the modern researcher to conclude presumptively that missionization represented the imposition of cultural norms through hegemonic control by the Spanish—a viewpoint that denies and abridges the complexity and variety of the experience of the people within the mission system during the colonial period. For this reason, I also contend that, in certain past studies of missionization in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish La Florida, a fundamentally important element of the mission experience has been given insufficient emphasis in mission studies: the element of systems of belief. The modern archaeologist or historian studying missionization and mission communities should remember that, at its heart, missionization represented a clash between 41

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belief systems, cosmologies, and worldviews: those of Spanish Catholic Europeans, steeped in the viewpoint and ideology of Catholic Christianity, and those of Native American cultures, richly varied throughout the area colonized by the Spanish and with great temporal depth and power of their own. Unfortunately, some past studies of the mission experience have failed to recognize this fundamental element. Drawing from theoretical perspectives largely processual in nature, such studies have emphasized “the sociopolitics, economics, iconography, and physical environment of the contact period . . . demography . . . architecture, and social dynamics” (Thomas 1990a:xiii–xiv). One such collection of mission studies from Florida notes: Most of the chapters in this book are the direct results of field research on mission sites. The authors are grappling with complex problems of the settlement pattern(s) of the mission villages and the search for the pattern(s) of the church complex within the village. They are concerned with evidences of acculturation and of ethnic, social and gender variables as they may be revealed in the archaeological record. . . . Other chapters are concerned with the contributions of bioarchaeology, zooarchaeology, and ethnobotany to the developing picture of the subsistence base and the health of the inhabitants. . . . We are finally beginning to understand something about the site plan and architecture of the church complex at the missions. (McEwan 1993b:xv–xvi) Unfortunately, little acknowledgment is given to the ways “architecture,” “acculturation,” “health,” “subsistence base,” and other physical “variables” came into existence because of the clash between Native American and European systems of belief. Belief systems and ideologies are not extraneous additions to cultural forms primarily determined by environment and technology, as some processual theorists have argued (Harris 1993:201–34; South 1990:329–42). Rather, they are one of the primary determinants of cultural forms and practices. Furthermore, belief systems are reflected in the forms of artifacts and sites that a culture produces, in the nature and values of the use of landscape and space within individual sites, and in the patterning of sites within a larger cultural region—a notion that archaeologists have long recognized but that has only recently played a central role in archaeological theory (Meskell and Preucel 2007; Taylor 1983 [1948]). Researchers of Spanish missions should also seek to understand the mission experience as a process of negotiation, or—building from a standard dictionary definition of this term—the use of conference, discussion, and compromise between individuals or groups to bring about the settlement of some matter.

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I argue that missionization should be viewed as a process of negotiation between centers of power: one represented by the Catholic Church and Spanish Crown, and one represented by Native American leaders and the cultures being missionized. Such a viewpoint treats missionization as a dynamic process where Native American systems of belief had the potential to play a powerful role in maintaining cultural cohesion in the face of Spanish attempts to change, control, and dominate Native American cultures through the mission system. Furthermore, such a viewpoint recognizes two fundamental realities of the mission experience. First, power relationships between the Spanish and Native Americans were as varied as the landscapes and cultures within and without the mission system, and existing Native American systems of belief were a vital component of such relationships. Second, such power relationships (as with any such relationships worldwide during the colonial period) were dependent in large part on the perceptions of indigenous groups of their own position, politically, economically and culturally, in the face of European expansion and the shifts in lifeways such expansion represented. Systems of belief, in this context, had the potential to create perceptions of cultural strength and value on the part of Native Americans that would have allowed negotiation of the mission experience from a position of relative power (as alluded to in other chapters in this volume). Taking this concept of negotiation within the mission experience as a starting point, in this chapter I discuss the missionization of a specific culture within seventeenth-century Spanish La Florida: the Timucuan chiefdom of Acuera in northern central Florida. I shall first discuss the historic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence from the Acuera cultural region relating to the colonial period, including recently discovered evidence from a site representing one of the missions to the Acuera. I then discuss this evidence using the concept of negotiation of the mission experience by the Acuera and draw conclusions concerning missionization both in this specific instance and, more broadly, throughout the mission system during the colonial period.

The Acuera Chiefdom: The Historical Evidence The Timucuan chiefdom of Acuera was located in what are today the Ocklawaha River Valley and the Ocala National Forest in north central Florida (Boyer 2010; Hann 1996; Worth 1998b). The earliest historical references to the Acuera chiefdom are from the accounts of the Hernando de Soto entrada, which indicate that the Acuera were a day’s journey away from the chiefdom

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of Ocale, believed on current evidence to have been just north of the Withlacoochee River in southwestern Marion County (Milanich and Hudson 1993). The accounts of both Rodrigo Ranjel and of Garcilaso de la Vega indicate that a column of men were sent east from Ocale to gather corn and supplies from the Acuera and that the Acuera strongly resisted the entry of the Spanish into their territory (Clayton et. al. 1993). Accounts of the French settlement at Fort Caroline in 1564–1565 indicate that, at that time, the Acuera chiefdom was a part of the Utina confederacy (Bennett 2001; Boyer 2010; Hulton 1977). Subsequent to the destruction of Fort Caroline and the founding of St. Augustine by the Spanish in 1565, the account of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda refers to the cacique of Acuera as “the one who has the pearls” (Worth 1995a), suggesting that the Acuera were a part of the existing network of trade and exchange between the different regions bordering their territory (Boyer 2010). The Acuera appear to have entered the mission system directly in 1597, when the cacica of Acuera, together with her husband and thirteen of her principal leaders, traveled to St. Augustine to swear fealty to the Spanish Crown and request missionization (Boyer 2010; Worth 1998a). Subsequently, three missions were constructed in Acuera territory: San Blas de Avino, founded around 1610 and existing through the 1620s (Boyer 2010; Worth 1998a, 1998b); and the later contemporaneous missions of San Luis de Eloquale and Santa Lucia de Acuera, founded in the 1620s and existing until the Timucuan Rebellion in 1656, when they seem to have been abandoned (Boyer 2010; Worth 1998a, 1998b). Records from this period, the first half of the seventeenth century, suggest the Acuera responded very differently to the presence of the missions in their territory than did the other missionized Timucua, as well as the missionized Apalachee and Guale. Descriptions of the relationship of Spanish friars and the missionized Native Americans of La Florida in most areas indicate that, despite the persistence of some traditional elements of belief and practice, most of the groups within the mission system set aside their traditional systems of belief for Catholic Christianity within a relatively short period of time—a generation or less—after missionization (Boyer 2010; Milanich 1995, 1999). Even at the height of the Timucuan Rebellion, most missionized Timucua were not attempting a return to traditional systems of belief and practice (Worth 1998b). Friars among the missionized Timucua were exempt from the orders of the rebel leaders to kill Spaniards, and captured leaders after the rebellion indicated that they remained loyal to both the Spanish Crown and to the Catholic Church (Worth 1998b). And after the Timucuan Rebellion, most Timucuan missions and the populations they served were uprooted and moved to loca-

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tions along the Camino Real, in a geographic restructuring that led to the mission communities acting as “way stations” for travelers along the road (Worth 1998b). Among the Acuera, however, a significantly different relationship existed between the Spanish and the Indians during this period. While the Acuera missions existed for nearly forty years, even at the height of the mission period, traditional religious leaders with numerous followers existed openly in Acuera territory. In one recorded instance, Governor Benito Ruiz de Salazar Vallecilla sent soldiers from the St. Augustine garrison to seize one such “sorcerer Indian” on the grounds that he had been causing “some disquiet” among the people of the region (Boyer 2010; Ruiz de Salazar Vallecilla 1648). Fugitives escaping the repartimiento commonly fled to Acuera during the mission era as well (Boyer 2010; Worth 1998a, 1998b). And, in the wake of the Timucuan Rebellion, the Acuera either were not subject to the order to move nearer to the Camino Real or defied the order outright, as they continued to reside in their traditional territory throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century. Documents from this later period indicate that the same sort of anomalous relationship between the Acuera and the Spanish continued to exist. The Acuera maintained a relationship with the Spanish colonial authorities during the latter half of the seventeenth century; they appear to have been subject to and sent workers for the labor draft in St. Augustine (Boyer 2010; Worth 1995b), and on several occasions, the Spanish presented gifts to the Acuera, including food and tools (Boyer 2010; Worth 1998b). However, this relationship did not include continuing missionization after the Timucuan Rebellion. Documents from later in the seventeenth century refer to the Acuera as “heathen” and indicate that the missions that had once existed in their territory were never refounded. The most illuminating documents concerning the culture of the Acuera from this later period are those from the murder trial of the Acuera Calesa, nephew of the chief of the Acuera, Jabajica, dating from 1677 and 1678. Calesa was tried, along with a woman of the Potano named Maria Jacoba, for the murders of four Christian Potano. Testimony adduced at trial indicated that the Acuera continued to possess a chiefdom social structure, with at least three towns (Piriaco, Biro Zebano, and Alisa) existing in their territory at this time (Hann 1992). Furthermore, the killings were directed specifically at missionized Timucua from a different chiefdom, and the trial documents emphasized that Calesa, his brother Pequata Nalis, and the other Acuera involved in the incident were “heathens” (Boyer 2010; Hann 1992). Calesa’s defender in the trial, Captain Juan de Pueyo, noted for the record that his client “was a heathen” who recognized no other authority than that of his uncle, Chief Jabajica,

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and consequently he should not be held fully accountable for the consequences of his actions. (The governor of Florida, as judge of the case, apparently took the argument seriously enough to commute a death sentence for Calesa into exile and forced labor in Havana.) Taking the historical documents as a whole, the relationship of the Acuera with the Spanish, before, during and after missionization, suggests a relatively unique situation existed within this region during the mission period. Unlike the other missionized Timucua, the Acuera appear to have possessed a “parallel” system to that of the Spanish, of both religious and political authority, even at the height of missionization. Also unlike other missionized Timucuan chiefdoms, the Acuera seem to have entered the mission system, remained there for nearly forty years, and then left the system—with their traditional territory, cultural practices, and systems of belief apparently intact and the Acuera as a culture maintaining some form of relationship with the Spanish colonial government while also maintaining their traditional systems of belief and practice.

The Acuera Chiefdom: Linguistic Evidence While the historical evidence concerning the Acuera chiefdom’s missionization is intriguing and virtually unique, the documents as they stand do not provide a full picture of the reasons that the Acuera responded differently to missionization than the other missionized cultures of La Florida, or what allowed them to create a system of parallel religious and political authorities within their territory. However, a linguistic analysis of the names of people and places from the historical documents concerning the Acuera provides intriguing evidence that the Acuera system of belief was the underlying factor defining and empowering the Acuera response to Spanish colonization. As a part of research concerning the Acuera chiefdom, a linguistic analysis of all known names of people and places from the Acuera chiefdom, as well as a representative sampling of names from the other Timucuan cultural regions, was performed by breaking each name into the Timucuan words composing the name and then translating these words into English (Boyer 2008, 2010; Granberry 1993). In the case of the other Timucuan chiefdoms, such an analysis suggested that names in regions outside Acuera territory were primarily physical descriptions or names of political status (Boyer 2010:71–83). For example, Saturiba—one of the paramount chiefs encountered by the French at Fort Caroline—means literally “handsome burning chief” (sa tori ba), while the name of his rival paramount, Olata Ouae Outina, is “chief of the forested

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region” (holata aya utina). Likewise, names of towns from other chiefdoms seem to be physical descriptions—Machava, “swamp” (machaba); Tarihica, “worker’s town” (tari hica); Cholupaha, “fallen dwelling” (chola paha); and so forth. In contrast, from the first time names within Acuera territory were recorded by the Spanish, nearly all such names appear to have had some form of ritual or ceremonial significance. The name Acuera itself is derived from the Timucuan words acu ero. Combined, the name has a dual significance: it can be rendered as “keeper of time” or “calendar” but also can be rendered to mean “ancient” or “the ancient ones” (Boyer 2010:72–73). The dual emphasis on both time and age suggests a ritual significance to the name of the culture. While this sort of ritual significance to Acuera names seems to have applied to names throughout the time of the mission period (Boyer 2008, 2010), it becomes especially pronounced, and increasingly obvious, in the records of the Calesa murder trial. The name of Calesa’s uncle, Jabajica, is a combination of the Timucuan words yaba hica—meaning literally “town of shamans” or “town of wizards” (Boyer 2008, 2010). Two of the names of the towns in the trial documents—Piliaco/Piriaco and Biro Zebano—mean, respectively, “to draw them to drink (the black drink [?])” (pili aco/pili uco) and “men like wolves” (biro si bano). Such names have clear supernatural and ritual associations. The testimony of Calesa and Maria Jacoba indicated that the name Calesa—“the handsome one/the agreeable one” (ca le sa), was a “childhood name”; now that Calesa was a man, his name was Yazah—“not handsome/not agreeable” (ya sa). Furthermore, Calesa was accompanied during the killings by his brother Pequata Nalis—“the golden servant/the golden vassal” (pequata nalis). The shift in names by Calesa/Yazah as a part of the killings, assisted by a “golden servant,” resulting in a change in status, is closely paralleled by the Apalachee myth of Nicoguadca, the god of thunder, who passed through three named stages to go from childhood, to adulthood, to the status of a deity (Boyer 2008, 2010; Hann 1988; Hann and McEwan 1998). We thus see, through analysis of the linguistic evidence, a noticeable difference between the names of people and places from outside Acuera territory— which appear to be primarily physical or locational descriptions—and those names used by the Acuera, all of which appear to have ritual and supernatural significance within the larger Timucuan culture. Thus, the linguistic evidence, by showing a strong supernatural and ritual significance for names from Acuera territory, strongly suggests that the Acuera system of belief played a highly important role in their cultural practice, from the time of initial contact through the mission/colonial period. Furthermore, this same supernatural significance of names, in the context of the Calesa murder trial, suggests that actions for which Calesa was tried should be viewed by the modern

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researcher in a ritual and ceremonial context, as a supernatural and religious response to conditions within the region under Spanish control.

The Acuera Chiefdom: The Archaeological Evidence If, as the historical and linguistic evidence suggests, the traditional system of belief of the Acuera allowed them to negotiate a culture of “parallel” religious and political authority within the mission system, there should be archaeological evidence suggesting differences between the Acuera and other missionized chiefdoms during the mission period. Based on discoveries to date at the Hutto/Martin site (8MR3447), which appears to represent the site of the Santa Lucia de Acuera mission (Boyer 2009, 2010), such differences did exist. The archaeological evidence upon which these conclusions are based is (1) the continued use, without apparent change or shift in location, of the same site for the principal town of the Acuera chiefdom throughout the period between the de Soto entrada and the end of the mission period among the Acuera; (2) the continuation, without change, of the same ceramic traditions in the mission period as were seen before contact; (3) the continued use of the “parallel/ perpendicular” mounds seen in this region before contact as markers of social space during the mission period; and (4) the differences between both European structural features and artifact assemblages at contemporaneous mission sites and those found and recorded at the Hutto/Martin site (Boyer 2010). The Hutto/Martin site, 8MR3447, is on the east side of the Ocklawaha River near the town of Moss Bluff, Florida. Shovel testing and block excavations at the site between 2006 and 2009 confirmed the presence of St. Johns II–era ceramics, lithics, and other Native American artifacts at the site, as well as Spanish artifacts dating from the mission period and earlier (Boyer 2009, 2010). In addition, block excavations confirmed the presence of at least two European-style structures at the site, which appear to represent the remains of the mission church and a convento with associated trash pits containing seventeenth-century Spanish artifacts as well (figure 3.1). Concerning the first difference noted above, the length of occupation of the Hutto/Martin site, the Spanish artifacts found included a Nueva Cadiz bead and a seven-layer faceted chevron bead, thus confirming the presence of a pre-1550 component (Deagan 1987) at the site. Spanish ceramics found included orange micaceous ware, with a date range of 1550–1650, as well as Sevilla blue-on-blue majolica, with a date range between 1580 and 1640 (Deagan 1987). Other beads found at the site, near the European structures, included both Itchetucknee blue beads dating to the early seventeenth cen-

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Figure 3.1. Plan view, block excavations, Hutto/Martin Site, 8MR3447 (Boyer 2010: 296).

tury and a yellow wire-wound glass bead with a date range between 1650 and 1750 (Deagan 1987), previously only known from shipwreck sites. This range of tightly dated Spanish artifacts suggests that the Hutto/Martin site was continually occupied from at least the early sixteenth century until at least the mid-seventeenth century—and possibly much longer. It is clearly documented that, in most of the areas associated with the de Soto entrada, towns and villages were devastated and depopulated even without direct contact with de Soto’s forces (Hann and McEwan 1998; Hutchinson 2006; Milanich 1995, 1999), let alone a direct and violent encounter as occurred between de Soto’s men and the Acuera (Clayton et. al. 1993). Yet the Hutto/Martin site, possibly de Soto’s sixteenth-century Acuera and definitely

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seventeenth-century Santa Lucia de Acuera (Boyer 2010), seems to have never been abandoned throughout the first two centuries of the Spanish contact and colonial era. This represents a major and significant difference between the Hutto/Martin site and other contemporaneous contact and mission sites of Spanish Florida. Even more significant—if not completely unique—is the complete absence at the Hutto/Martin site of both of the major mission-period Native American ceramic complexes for this region: Altamaha/San Marcos wares, associated with coastal and eastern mission sites (Deagan and Thomas 2009), and Leon-Jefferson wares, associated with the western mission region (Deagan and Thomas 2009; McEwan 1993b; Weisman 1992). Long known by mission archaeologists to be markers of the onset of Spanish colonization and missionization in the Southeast, Worth has argued that the presence of such wares at mission sites represents “a manifestation of new regional interaction networks reflecting a combination of two governing influences: geographic location (particularly with respect to coastal vs. interior regions), and overarching integration into the evolving colonial system of greater Spanish Florida (incorporating all aspects of integration, from sociopolitical to economic)” (Worth 2009a:206). Given the ubiquitous presence of such wares at all other mission sites discovered to date, the ceramics recovered from the Hutto/Martin site present a stark contrast. St. Johns ceramics dominate the assemblage, forming 61 percent by count and 58 percent by weight of the total ceramics found at the site; sand-tempered ceramics, including Alachua-tradition ceramics, form 35 percent by count and 36 percent by weight of the remaining assemblage (Boyer 2010:322). Neither Altamaha/San Marcos wares nor Leon-Jefferson wares are present at the site. While some Mission Red Filmed ceramics were recovered, such sherds form less than 1 percent by both count and weight of the total ceramic assemblage (Boyer 2010:322). Given the presence of such wares at all other mission sites discovered to date, the absence of both Leon-Jefferson and Altamaha/San Marcos wares is a clear and significant difference between the Hutto/Martin site and all other mission sites studied thus far. The nearest mission site outside Acuera territory, the Mount Royal site/San Antonio de Enacape (8PU53), contained Altamaha/San Marcos wares (Tesar 2001). While it could be argued that such wares represent a resettlement by missionized Yamasee, fugitivism and settlement in Acuera territory by extralocal groups took place as well (Boyer 2010; Worth 1998b)—yet the ceramic assemblage at the Hutto/Martin site is virtually identical to precontact St. Johns II–era sites found throughout the Ocklawaha River Valley (Boyer 2009, 2010), with no extralocal ceramics present in the site’s artifact assemblage.

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A third piece of archaeological evidence suggesting a differing response by the Acuera to missionization is that the presence of patterned mound construction and social use of space at 8MR3447 is identical to that found at precontact sites throughout the Ocklawaha River Valley. Mound sites along the Ocklawaha River have been found to exhibit a common pattern of construction and site patterning. All such mounds observed to date, with a single exception, have been found to be oblong ovals, usually about thirty meters long. On the river’s western side, such mounds have their long axes constructed parallel to the river’s axis of flow at any location; on the eastern side, such mounds are constructed with their long axes at ninety degrees perpendicular to the river’s axis of flow wherever they are located (Boyer 2007, 2010:212) (figure 3.2). Subsurface testing at several sites has revealed that such mounds, for this region, appear to represent markers of socially bounded space and activity at sites where they are present. That is, all activity at such sites seems to have taken place between such mounds and the Ocklawaha River; beyond the mounds, subsurface tests at all sites tested to date have revealed no artifacts, suggesting the mounds bounded the areas where human activity took place (Boyer 2010; Cerrato 1994).

Figure 3.2. “Idealized” mound patterning, Ocklawaha River Valley sites (Boyer 2010:212).

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While the Hutto/Martin site is much larger than other such sites along the Ocklawaha River—average site size in this area is an acre or less, while the Hutto/Martin site covers more than twenty acres in total extent (Boyer 2007, 2010:292)—like the precontact sites in this area, it also is marked out by a mound bounding the area of human activity. The eastern side of the Hutto/Martin site has a badly damaged mound, thirty-one and one-half meters at its longest axis, with that axis constructed ninety degrees perpendicular to the Ocklawaha River’s axis of flow at this location (Boyer 2010:295). Extensive shovel testing revealed that the pattern of use and human activity at the Hutto/Martin site, like St. Johns II– era sites observed and tested in this area, was bounded by this mound. West of the mound, between it and the river, shovel tests produced extensive concentrations of artifacts and features, while east of the mound, all tests were found to be sterile, devoid of any evidence of human activity (Boyer 2010; Cerrato 1994). The association of mound construction with ritual activity for the Timucuan cultural area is so well documented that I need hardly belabor it here (Milanich 1994, 1996). That being so, it is significant that, at a mission site within Acuera territory, the cultural practice of mound use as a marker for socially bounded space and human activity was carried on during the mission era in a pattern identical to one seen in this area for centuries prior to European contact and missionization (Boyer 2007, 2010). Doing so at a site where the Spanish were attempting to change and to eliminate precontact systems of belief is striking, particularly since mounds are visible monuments of such systems. Finally, there are significant differences between the European artifact assemblage and structural features at the Hutto/Martin site compared with such assemblages from other contemporaneous mission sites. In terms of sheer quantity, the Spanish ceramic assemblage from the Hutto/Martin site is much less varied than such assemblages from coastal mission sites or from mission sites near the Camino Real. Only five clearly identifiable types of Spanish ceramics—olive jar, Sevilla blue-on-blue and Columbia plain majolica, orange micaceous ware, and red ware—have been found to date at the site, compared with larger and more varied assemblages in other locations (Boyer 2010; McEwan 1993b). More important, within structure 1, believed to be the mission church, two important deposits were found during the course of block excavations. In the western wall of the structure, in the northwestern corner, a polished Bolen point was found. This point was recovered from a stain between the northwestern corner post and a wall post immediately south of it and appears to have been deliberately placed within the wall, rather than incidentally swept within it as fill (Boyer 2010). Also found deposited in the western wall of

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structure 1, in the wall’s center, was an intact sinistral whelk shell (Busycon sp.). Like the Bolen point, this shell was recovered from a stain between two wall posts that suggests the shell was deliberately buried within the wall of structure 1 during the course of its construction (see figure 3.1). Bolen points, which were produced during the transitional period between the Late Paleoindian and Early Archaic period in Florida (Milanich 1994; Purdy 1981), would have been nearly as ancient for the inhabitants of the mission as they are for a modern observer. Sinistral whelk shells have been documented to have strong symbolic and ritual associations in many late precontact and historical Native American cultures throughout the Southeast, the spiral pattern of sinistral whelks being particularly associated with the movement of the sun and with death (Kozuch 1998). The presence of two such objects, apparently deliberately placed within the walls of a European structure, suggests a “subversion” of the European presence at 8MR3447, particularly in view of the fact that such deliberate Native American ritual deposits have not been reported from within European structures at other mission sites (John E. Worth, personal communications 2009, 2010; McEwan 1993b; Weisman 1992; Milanich 1995, 1999).

Discussion and Conclusions For the Acuera cultural region, then, there is historic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence indicating that (1) the Acuera seem to have maintained a more traditional cultural and political structure, including long-held ritual and religious practices, than did other missionized Native Americans during the seventeenth century; (2) the ability of the Acuera to maintain these practices seems to have focused around their traditional system of belief and worldviews; (3) the practice of their beliefs was open, systemic, and deliberate, defying Spanish attempts to change or restructure their culture; and (4) this defiance allowed the Acuera to maintain much of their cultural structure, in their original territory, when other Timucuan speakers, as well as the Apalachee and Guale, had suffered devastating demographic shifts and population loss throughout the same period (Boyer 2010; Worth 1998a, 1998b). Given this evidence, what does this suggest about the missionization of the Acuera in particular and about mission studies more broadly? In my judgment, the finds from 8MR3447, as well as the study of historical and linguistic records of the Acuera, suggest that for this region—and, more broadly, for studies of missionization of any Native American culture— historical archaeologists will gain a more complete picture of the process of

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missionization through viewing that process as one of negotiation between centers of power, both European and Native American. Concomitant with this, the modern researcher should give primacy to the systems of belief and worldviews that both Europeans and Native Americans practiced to fully understand the human reality underlying the archaeological record at mission sites. Unfortunately, this sort of perspective still does not govern the bulk of archaeological research focusing on the contact and mission periods; indeed, it appears that the opposite is true. Consider the following passage concerning the missions from a well-known and popular text designed for introductory archaeological courses: “At its seventeenth century zenith, Spanish Florida had three dozen Franciscan missions, each a satellite settlement heavily dependent on the colonial capital at St. Augustine” (Thomas and Kelly 2010:64, emphasis added). I believe this statement, taken as a whole, reveals both a materialist and Eurocentric bias in its suggestion that the mission communities were mere “satellites” of St. Augustine, “heavily dependent” on help and assistance from the colonial capital. On the contrary, the archaeological and historical evidence quite clearly demonstrates that the mission communities produced most of the food and provided most of the labor that allowed the “colonial capital” to survive, that the leaders and people of Native American communities were quite aware of the important role they played in the capital’s survival, and that they were also aware of their own power and systems of belief, even at the height of missionization. The above passage also demonstrates a continuing inattention to the ways in which perception and belief not only affected the experience of missionization of Native American communities by the Spanish but also formed its very center. Fortunately, as noted in chapter 11 of this volume and shown in chapter 2, this viewpoint seems to be changing in more recent studies of the southeastern mission experience where indigenous social, political, and ideological practices shaped the contexts of colonial engagements, as well the consequences of engaging with Spanish missions. At its heart, missionization was not a matter of “the sociopolitics, economics, iconography, and physical environment of the contact period . . . demography . . . architecture, and social dynamics” (Thomas 1990a:xiii–xiv)—nor of any other purely material, economic, or political factors. Such factors were, and are, important in understanding the mission system, but they were secondary factors resulting from the primary core of the mission experience: the attempt by the Spanish to replace existing Native American systems of belief and worldviews with that of Catholic Christianity. Thus, if one views the process of missionization as a process of negotiation between centers of power, it follows that, where Native American belief systems created a sense of cultural

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and social power on the part of their practitioners, the mission process would have proceeded on a more “equal” basis than where such systems were perceived as weaker. Consider the specific case of the Acuera. When viewed within the context of the missionized cultures of La Florida, the historic, linguistic, and archaeological evidence all suggest that the Acuera system of belief was the basis that gave them the ability to negotiate a unique role within the mission system. Even at the height of missionization, with manned missions present in their territory for more than forty years, the Acuera openly maintained a system of “parallel” religious authorities, with traditional shamans having substantial followings existing alongside Catholic friars (Boyer 2009, 2010)—in stark contrast to other missionized Timucua, where Catholicism seems to have replaced traditional systems of belief (Milanich 1995, 1999). At the close of the Timucuan Rebellion, unlike other missionized Timucua, the Acuera defied or ignored Governor Diego de Rebolledo’s order to concentrate along the Camino Real and remained in their traditional territory throughout the remainder of the seventeenth century (Boyer 2010; Worth 1998b). And during this latter period, the Acuera seem to have maintained a relationship with the Spanish colonial government—while at the same time retaining their traditional religious and social systems, openly proclaiming themselves as the “keepers of time” and the home of the “wizard’s town” (Boyer 2008, 2010; Hann 1992). Applying this research lens more broadly to the entire mission system, the example of the Acuera suggests that historical archaeologists studying mission sites should develop theoretical perspectives and corresponding research designs that allow for historical and archaeological studies aimed at understanding Native American systems of belief and cultural practice as a primary component, if not the primary component, of the mission experience. Taylor (1983 [1948]) first articulated the fact that culture and cultural systems are mental constructs, based on human ideas and worldviews, and that artifacts and the archaeological record were thus concrete, physical representations of human thoughts and ideas. More recently, modern theoretical perspectives based on agency theory and landscape and spatial studies provide a basis for understanding systems of belief and worldview as they are reflected in the archaeological record (Hodder 1987, 2001; Meskell and Preucel 2007). If our goal as historical archaeologists is to develop a complete picture of the human reality underlying the material record at mission sites, I argue that any theoretical perspective for such studies based primarily on economic, material, technological, or political factors in the historical and archaeological record is inadequate for the task. The central and most important factor of the mission experience was a clash of belief systems, European and Native American. That

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clash of beliefs cannot be understood from a purely material perspective, nor should it be viewed as a process of “resistance” to European encroachment by Native Americans, as such a perspective still tacitly places greater cultural strength and power in the hands of Europeans. Only by treating missionization as a process of negotiation between centers of power, with belief systems and ideology forming a core component of the cultural perspectives of both Europeans and Native Americans, will we be able to adequately design research strategies that will help us to understand fully the archaeological record of mission sites and the human reality that created the record we observe.

4 Missions Untenable Experiences of the Hasinai Caddo and the Spanish in East Texas

Paul Shawn Marceaux and Mariah F. Wade

The establishment of Spanish colonial missions among the Hasinai Caddo of East Texas in the late seventeenth century marked a political and religious commitment to the territory east of Coahuila (for a discussion of Coahuila and the Texas-Mexico border, see chapter 6, this volume). While the religious orders were generally proactive in their attempts to Christianize Native populations, the Crown was mostly reactive. This mutual commitment emphasized, therefore, the geopolitical importance of the Hasinai territory in light of the continued French activities in the region and Spanish need to stem French influence. Archival sources amply demonstrate the strategic relevance of the region and the Hasinai ambivalence to French and Spanish political and economic partnerships. Several factors rendered those missions unsustainable. Ultimately, Hasinai strategic policy, or reluctance, to comply with Spanish demands to change their traditional settlement patterns created conditions of Christianization and control that neither the missionaries nor the military were willing to overcome. As part of ongoing research related to historic Caddo archaeology, we have examined information from sites in the upper Neches and Angelina River valleys of East Texas. This is an area known to be the home of the Hasinai Caddo and their ancestors. Our focus is the initial period of contact between the Caddo and European explorers and the resulting sustained interaction between these Native American groups and colonial settlers, including Spanish missionizing activities. We use information obtained from archival records during European expeditions and colonization efforts, as well as analyses of distinctive ceramic assemblages and European trade goods recovered from 57

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known historic Caddo sites and Spanish missions in the area, to discuss the experiences of the Hasinai.

The Hasinai Caddo of East Texas Historic accounts established that the southern Caddo were organized into three loosely allied groups, the Hasinai, Natchitoches, and Kadohadacho (figure 4.1). These alliances were likely kin based, yet each had their own identity and governed itself independently. The focus of the following study is the Hasinai groups, who according to Fray Francisco Casañas in 1691 consisted of nine principal tribes (Cachae, Nabadacho, Nabiti, Nacachau, Nacono, Nasayaha, Nazadachotzi, Necha, and Nechavi) living within an area approximately 150 kilometers long. Together, the Hasinai groups had a population of approximately 2,400–2,800 people in the 1690s (Marceaux and Perttula 2010). Numerous sources document the history and the sociopolitical organi-

Figure 4.1. Historic Caddo groups at the time of European contact.

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zation of these allied groups (Bolton 1908, 1987; Carter 1995; Griffith 1954; Newkumet and Meredith 1988; Swanton 1942; Wyckoff and Baugh 1980). The nature of these alliances, sometimes referred to as confederacies, changed through time, but it is clear from the archival record that the groups maintained distinct affiliations during the contact period (Perttula 1992; Story 1978; Wyckoff and Baugh 1980). The formation of the Hasinai Caddo alliance occurred before the permanent presence of Europeans in East Texas, but researchers are unsure of exactly when or why it formed. Researchers do know that sustained contact led to destabilization and depopulation and that by the mid-eighteenth century Caddo society likely relied on individual kin groups more than on the confederacies (Gregory 1973). Caddo farmsteads were self-supportive but often connected to the more familiar mound complexes, which later in the Historic period fell into disuse (Perttula 1992). A map from the Terán de los Ríos expedition (1691–1692) on the Red River illustrates a temple mound with an associated structure still in use and the location of the caddi’s house. The map also shows elevated granaries, outdoor arbors, cultivated plots, and the individual compounds with circular structures shaped like large beehives with thatched roofs and likely wattle-and-daub lower walls (Hatcher 1932). The Caddo practiced a subsistence economy centered on the basic activities of farming, hunting, food collecting, and fishing. They were successful horticulturalists, planting and cultivating fields of corn, the primary crop in historic times, as well as beans, squash, and endemic cultigens. Horticulture and the production of maize were major components of the subsistence economy, but the Caddo made use of a diversified food production system (Wyckoff and Baugh 1980).

Initial Contact The first documented contact between the Caddo groups of East Texas and the Europeans took place in 1542 with the Hernando de Soto expedition. After de Soto’s death in May of that year, Luís de Moscoso Alvarado took over command and went about the task of returning the surviving members of the expedition to Spanish Mexico. Although brief, the chronicles of the Moscoso expedition offer insight into the geographic boundaries and social organization of Caddo polities in the 1540s (Perttula 2002). Archaeological evidence for the expedition is minimal and primarily suggestive (Perttula 1992:27), but the accounts, experiences, and routes of the de Soto expedition have received great attention (Hudson 1997; Kenmotsu et al. 1993; Perttula 1992; Swanton 1985; Young and Hoffman 1993).

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The first Spanish trip into East Texas was neither peaceful nor pleasant, as Caddo groups banded together to attack the Spanish before they reached the Red River. These efforts did not succeed, and the Spanish continued into several Caddo provinces, reaching the land of the Guasco in the Neches and Angelina River valleys (Perttula 1992:26). They spent little time in the area, but the expedition provisioned itself with corn and took slaves. It later passed through the provinces of Naquiscoça and Naçacahoz, near the modern town of Nacogdoches, Texas (Hudson 1997:369–70). From here, the expedition sent scouts west, but they reported nothing but wretchedness and poverty. Short on food and options, they returned east to the place of de Soto’s death for the winter. These earliest Native–European interactions in East Texas were fleeting, unpredictable, and dangerous. In a foreign land in search of gold and loot, the Spanish needed Native groups to provide food and supplies, guides, and interpreters. What the Spanish did not have, they took. The first accounts document Caddo resistance, but responses frequently devolved into fight or flight. They were not given much choice, because “if they were friendly to the Spanish they were frequently enslaved; if they fought back, they were enslaved or killed” (Wade 2008:107).

Sustained Contact On the initial trip of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle from Fort Saint Louis on the Texas Gulf Coast to locate the Mississippi River, he entered the lands of the Cenis (the French name for the Hasinai) just west of the Neches River. Accounts provide details of a burgeoning frontier economy, such as how the French traded axes for a few horses owned by the Hasinai (Foster 1998:146). Few, if any, Europeans had entered or spent time in East Texas since the 1540s. Nevertheless, the Hasinai had access to the horse by 1686. La Salle’s trip was cut short on his second expedition from Fort Saint Louis when members of his own party assassinated him. Henri Joutel, a comrade of La Salle, together with the mutinous group crossed the Neches River, again arriving in the Hasinai villages. Joutel, a trusted and distinguished chronicler, stayed for almost three months and provides in-depth information about the Caddo groups inhabiting East Texas in the late seventeenth century (Foster 1998:203–31). For example, a member of the Cenis (Hasinai) on horseback and dressed in Spanish clothing surprised Joutel as he approached the village. More than three years before the Spanish founded their first missions, “seven or eight of them had sword blades with clusters of feathers on the hilt. These blades were squared like those of the Spaniards; they also had several large

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bells . . . a few of them also had some piece of blue material which they must have obtained from the Spaniards” (Foster 1998:206). It is clear that the Hasinai had a fondness for European goods. The Hasinai traded for the French items when possible, and because the French were decidedly dependent on the Hasinai for food, goods, and other materials, some sort of exchange accompanied most interactions. Noting the Hasinai affinity for, and yet lack of, knives and hatchets, Joutel declared this as proof that “the Spaniards had not given them much” (Foster 1998:210). News of the French settlement on the Texas coast left Spain no choice but to begin settlement and missionary work in East Texas. Deserters soon alerted the Spanish of La Salle’s intentions to settle the Texas coast (Chipman 1992). A sporadic founding and abandonment of European settlements marked the next 100 years, with both the Spanish and French vying for the support and allegiance of Caddo groups. Before La Salle, contact with the Hasinai groups was marginal and passing. There was little more than a slow trickle of Europeans and goods making their way into Texas. Toward the close of the eighteenth century, the Hasinai Caddo saw an increase in European activity in their homelands.

The First Spanish Missions in East Texas, 1690–1693 The head of the Hasinai met the Spanish expedition led by Fray Damián Massanet and Captain Alonso de León (Chipman 1992). This first meeting was full of pomp and pageantry, including a procession of Spanish officers and priests. They then worked for six days to establish the first Spanish mission in East Texas, San Francisco de los Tejas, in May 1690 (figure 4.2). Accounts place the Mission Tejas in the middle of the Nabedache village on San Pedro Creek. The Caddo insisted that no more than six men, three priests and three soldiers, remain at the mission for fear that the Spanish would take the Hasinai’s women; that the Spanish complied is something of an exception. Domingo Terán de los Ríos, the first Spanish governor of Texas, along with Fr. Massanet, received orders to establish new missions in East Texas in 1691. Eight missions were authorized, including at least one more among the Hasinai and four among the Kadohadacho of the Red River (Chipman 1992:93). En route to East Texas, the Spanish received two letters from the missionaries riding out a storm of trouble in the Hasinai villages. By the time the Spanish arrived one priest had died, and relationships strained as the Hasinai suffered the effects of disease and drought. Nevertheless, they still managed to found a second mission, Mission Santísimo Nombre de María. It was

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Figure 4.2. Overlay with Spanish missions/presidios and historic Native American sites.

less than ten kilometers to the east of the first mission and closer to the Neches River. Both missions were within the boundaries of the Nabedache. After a brief trip to the coast for desperately needed provisions, Terán returned to East Texas to find that the conditions had worsened. Bernardino, who was appointed Hasinai leader after the death of his uncle, told the Spanish that he was temporarily leaving the village and that they should not be around when he returned. After a brief visit to the Kadohadacho on the Red River Terán de los Ríos left East Texas, along with six of the missionaries, leaving only three missionaries and nine soldiers at the missions (Chipman 1992:98; Hatcher 1932). The expedition constructed no new missions and only scant new information came from their trip to the Kadohadacho. Although given a number of tasks, including exploration of the lower Mississippi Valley, few

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were completed. Terán de los Ríos’s biggest contribution to modern archaeology is one of the earliest and most discussed maps of the Nasoni Caddo village on the Red River. In the fall of 1693, the missionaries buried the mission bells, packed up, and prepared to abandon East Texas. Before abandoning Mission Tejas during the night in October 1693, they set it afire. Although four soldiers deserted and lived with the local Native groups for some time (Chipman 1992:99), from 1694 to 1715 all of East Texas was “officially” unoccupied by the Spanish as the first effort at colonization lasted less than four years. A great deal of information from this first period of continuous occupation describes the early Spanish missionizing experience in East Texas. Among other things, the Caddo refused to settle at the missions, were largely indifferent to religious instruction, and held the Spanish responsible for the horrible diseases that swept through the settlements. Barr (2007) noted the Spanish soldiers’ abuse of Caddo women as another reason for the problems in East Texas.

The Second Period of Spanish Missions in East Texas, 1716–1773 The Spanish were again forced into settling Texas when Louis Juchereau de St. Denis, a French-Canadian soldier, trader, and explorer, arrived at the Spanish presidio of San Juan Bautista on the Rio Grande in 1714. St. Denis was sent after the French received a letter from Fray Francisco Hidalgo appealing for assistance in East Texas. The letter, drafted years earlier, encouraged the two powers to coordinate Spanish missionizing activities and directly contradicted official policy. St. Denis’s arrival erased any doubts as to French whereabouts and intentions. The French presence, and the potential for gaining influence, ultimately convinced the Spanish that settlements were once more necessary in Texas. The Spanish commitment to reoccupy East Texas included the establishment of four missions and a presidio. To a great extent, the Caddo negotiated among themselves as to the locations for the missions (Foster 1995; Tous 1930). Presidio Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de los Tejas was founded in June 1716 east of the former Mission Tejas and then moved to the east side of the Neches River in the fall (see figure 4.2). The renamed Mission Nuestro Padre San Francisco de los Tejas, officially established for the Neche and nearby tribes of the Hasinai, was reestablished near its original location. Mission Nuestra Señora de la Purísima Concepción was established in the principal village of the Hainai, then the head of the allied Hasinai groups.

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The third mission, Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe de los Nacogdoches, was located at the main village of the Nacogdoche tribe. It was east-southeast of Mission Concepción and given to Fray António Margil de Jesús; it was the only mission at this time under the direction of the college of Zacatecas (Castañeda 1936). A fourth mission, San José de los Nasonis, was set up west of Mission Guadalupe in the village of the Nasoni. Two more missions were founded for the College of Zacatecas in early 1717 and for Nuestra Señora de los Dolores de los Ais and San Miguel de los Adaes. According to studies, the Ais and Adae were not members of the Hasinai alliance and “belong more properly” with the Red River Caddo (Bolton 1987:32; Griffith 1954:58). It took little time for the Spanish to realize that they were not prepared for a sustained missionary presence among the Hasinai. During the establishment of missions in 1716, the Hasinai told Fray Isidro Félix de Espinosa “they could not assemble until they had gathered their harvest” (Tous 1930:22). Two years later, at Mission Tejas, the Hasinai informed Martín de Alarcón, then governor of Coahuila and Texas, that they could not congregate because many of their people were out hunting buffalo (Castañeda 1936:103). These are activities related to subsistence, not the soul, and the Hasinai had numerous reasons to remain noncommittal. Whether the Hasinai resorted to subterfuges to avoid congregation into a pueblo or, as the friars rationalized later, the reality of the local landscape and agricultural demands precluded any other arrangements is actually a moot point. In fact, those were subsistence imperatives that could also serve as reasons not to congregate. Conditions at the missions were bordering on desperate in less than two years, as the Spanish lacked food, clothes and essential religious accessories. All of the Spanish missions and presidios in East Texas were hastily removed to San Antonio in 1719 when international conflict spilled over into colonial ventures (Castañeda 1936; Espinosa 1964). Several Frenchmen attacked Mission Adaes, where there were only two people present, a Spanish soldier and a religious lay brother. The Marqués de Aguayo’s first assignment was to retake East Texas and fight off the French. In terms of settling in the area, however, the Spanish had twice offered the Hasinai Caddo missions and the services of the clergy and were “ignored, rebuffed, and twice expulsed” (Wade 1998:117). Still, this was not enough to dissuade the Spanish, and in the next decade they sent Aguayo to retake East Texas, fight off the French, and reestablish the missions and presidio in East Texas. With the help of Fray Espinosa and Fray Margil, Aguayo immediately began to restore the missions and presidios in East Texas in 1721. In most cases, the missions were in ruins; in others, no vestiges of the churches or dwellings remained (Forrestal 1935; Foster 1995). The mission of San Fran-

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cisco de los Tejas was reestablished in the same village of the Neche. Likewise, the missionaries reestablished the Concepción, Nasonis, Guadalupe, and Dolores missions in the same locations (Castañeda 1936:154). In the easternmost part of the missionary field, a Spanish scouting party located rancherias of the Adae about ten or fifteen leagues (forty-two to sixtythree kilometers) away from the former mission site. The Spanish urged the Adae to congregate in the rebuilt mission, but a month later still not enough Native Americans were around to start the mission. The Spanish established a new presidio Nuestra Señora del Pilar de los Adaes and staffed it with one hundred men (Chipman 1992:123). Placed between the Red and Sabine Rivers, near the French trading post of Fort St. Jean Baptiste aux Natchitos and right next to the old site of Mission Adaes, the presidio would become the first Spanish capital in the province of Texas (see figure 4.2). The presidio and mission have been located near Robeline, Louisiana, and excavations were conducted there (Avery 1996; Gregory et al. 1980, 1982, 1984; Webb and Gregory 1978). Finally, Aguayo relocated Presidio Tejas from the Neches River to a site nearer the Angelina River. Stationed in proximity to the Mission Concepción, the Spanish staffed it with twenty-five soldiers. As Chipman noted (1992:126), “Aguayo would later face criticism for the cost of maintaining the presidial defenses he had set up in Texas, but overall his expedition secured, as never before, Spain’s claim to the province.” Presidio Adaes would in fact be the seat of the Spanish government in the area for the next fifty years. Aguayo had reestablished all of the missions, added another presidio, and significantly increased the Spanish civil, military, and religious presence in East Texas.

Missionizing on the Hasinai Landscape Fray Espinosa’s Chronica Apostolica y Seraphica de Todos los Colegios de Propaganda Fide, published in 1746 (Cañedo 1964), clarifies several issues related to the placement of the various missions beginning in 1691. After the establishment of missions San Francisco de los Tejas and Santísimo Nombre de María, the friars understood the Hasinai could not congregate about the mission sites as they relied on the small, well-watered valleys with loose soil to plant and grow their crops. This resulted in dispersed farmsteads, distant from each other two or three leagues (8.4–12.5 kilometers) and often more. Although they visited the dwellings of the Natives, the friars catechized only those Natives who came to the missions, and most baptisms were administered at the moment of dying (Cañedo 1964:679–80).

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In 1716, Mission La Purísima established for the Hainai and under Espinosa’s care, was twenty leagues (83.6 kilometers) from San Francisco de los Tejas and ten leagues (41.8 kilometers) from Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, the mission established for the Nacogdoche. Mission San José de los Nasonis, established for the tribe of the same name, was likewise located ten leagues to the north of Mission Concepción (Cañedo 1964:686). Later, the missions were moved to wider spaces in the landscape aiming to congregate the Natives, but according to Espinosa, the lay of the land and the location of water sources and fertile, easy-to-till soils did not accommodate the upward of one thousand people who inhabited each pueblo. These moves, which indicate mutual efforts to negotiate different needs and perceptions of the landscape, did not diminish the distances between the missions and the Native farmsteads. Fray Espinosa noted that some rancherias were close to the missions but others were six and seven leagues distant (25– 29.2 kilometers). Besides, in 1717 and 1718, the harvests were poor and that affected the Natives and the friars who depended on the Natives for their sustenance. This effectively removed any leverage the friars might have had to compel the Natives to relocate (Cañedo 1964:719, 721, 725). This situation did not change; Espinosa stated that in twenty years the Franciscans had been in Texas, they never had the consolation of congregating the Hasinai groups (Cañedo 1964:719). In 1749, Fray Ignacio Ciprián reported on the Tejas missions (Leutenegger 1979). According to his report, Mission Guadalupe had been located amidst the twenty-two rancherias of the Nacogdoche, but at some point the Nacogdoche moved northward after complaining that the Vidai, their Native neighbors to the south, were damaging their crops. After that, the Guadalupe friar ministered occasionally to the Hainai, Neche, and Nasoni but had to travel extensively (Leutenegger 1979:25–26). Summarizing the reasons that the Hasinai had never congregated, Fray Ciprián explained that it was impossible to force them through war as they were much more numerous than the Spanish, and since the Hasinai grew abundant crops, they did not depend on the Spanish.

The Slow Decline and Final Years of the Missions Among the Hasinai Beginning in 1721, important Spanish persons such as Fray Hidalgo and Fray Margil either left the mission field in East Texas or passed on. Consecutive years of crop failures at Presidio Adaes and delays of goods from interior Spanish Mexico made matters worse. Beginning in 1724, multiple inspections de-

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termined that the missions and presidios should be abandoned. As before, few if any of the Hasinai Caddo chose to live in the various mission complexes and reductions in the Texas presidios left fewer than 120 Spanish soldiers in all of Texas. By July 1730, the Spanish had closed Presidio Tejas and moved the three Querétaran missions, Concepción, Tejas, and Nasonis, to the Colorado River. Forty years after founding their first mission, the Spanish abandoned the westernmost area of the Hasinai Caddo. At this time, the Natchitoches supplied Presidio Adaes and, by extension, the three Zacatecan missions, Guadalupe, Dolores, and Adaes, with most of the necessary provisions. Chipman (1992:144) states that “the population did not even carry on subsistence farming, forcing its dependence on basic foodstuffs purchased at Natchitoches from St. Denis on his terms.” A report in 1744 noted that not a single Native American was living at the Guadalupe, Dolores, or Adaes missions (Magnaghi 1984:175–76). According to Juan Agustín de Morfi (1935:91), by the 1750s there was a French trader living in every Caddo village, including those in Spanish Texas. France ceded all of Louisiana west of the Mississippi River to Spain in 1762, and East Texas became an interior province. Final rounds of inspections took place several years later and provide some of the last official reports from the East Texas missions and presidios (Forrestal 1931; Jackson 1995; Kress 1931). The determinations of the inspections, along with new international considerations, were reason enough for the Spanish to abandon all Spanish settlements in the area by 1773.

Historic Caddo Archaeology in East Texas Analyses of public and private archaeological collections from Hasinai Caddo and Spanish mission sites in East Texas were conducted with the help of professionals and avocationalists. The largest part of materials from these sites are Caddo ceramic vessel sherds, but other materials include complete vessels, European trade goods, and lithic tools. All of the sites in this study contain materials associated with the Historic period in East Texas, such as European trade goods or ceramic types (i.e., Patton Engraved) dated to the period (ca. AD 1650–1800). At present, these are the defining criteria for identifying Hasinai Caddo sites in the archaeological record. We used the character of the collections to evaluate the participation and involvement of the Hasinai with the Spanish mission sites. European trade goods are present at more than two-thirds of the historic Caddo sites in the study area (see figure 4.2). Indeed, the presence of European trade goods remains the

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primary means to gauge the level of trade between colonizers and indigenous populations. Acidic soils in East Texas normally prevent perishable items such as cloth, food, and other dry goods from being preserved (for an exception, see Loren 2001). Consequently, the collections of European trade goods consist primarily of glass, metals, and European-made ceramics. Gunflints of local and nonlocal lithic materials are one of the few other durable materials indicative of post-European contact. Most of the sites in this study are Allen phase sites (ca. 1650–early 1800s). Regrettably, few collections of European trade goods from these sites provide enough evidence to determine a date within this 150-year period. For example, glass trade beads represent among the more temporally sensitive items. Generally, large blue beads are some of the earliest trade beads introduced by Europeans, and smaller seed beads occur later in time. We identified and classified numerous trade beads from the collections, but beyond those general chronological differences establishing a more precise chronology for the sites remains problematic. Presence, quantity, and range of European trade goods contribute most to intersite chronology and to evaluate trade relationships.

European Trade Goods at the Missions and Historic Caddo Sites in East Texas To assess the participation and involvement of the Caddo at the Spanish mission sites, we compared the collections from the Nasonis and Dolores missions with each other and to sites in close proximity. The archaeological site of Mission Nasonis (41RK200) was located on the east fork of the Angelina River. Found about the same time, two smaller, contemporaneous sites in the area (41RK191, 41RK197) serve for comparison with Mission Nasonis. We also examined materials from Mission Dolores in the Attoyac Bayou (41SA25) (Carlson and Corbin 1999; Corbin et al. 1980, 1990). These were compared with the McElroy site (41SA116), a farmstead in the Attoyac Bayou just west of Mission Dolores. Mission Nasonis and Mission Dolores both have extensive collections of European goods, far more than other archaeological sites of the period. More than a thousand European trade goods were recovered from Mission Dolores, including European ceramics, forged nails, glass fragments, gun parts, horse accessories, metal jewelry, and domestic items. Excavations at Mission Nasonis recovered hundreds of nails, European ceramics, glass beads, and metallic objects such as knives and awls. As expected, the items from these two collections are very much alike. For example, the same types of beads, chocolatera

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handles, bridle fragments, and trigger guards are present at both missions. In support of the historical records, large numbers of goods of French origin are present as well. The distribution of trade goods is consistent with the missions’ role as a major source. Unsurprisingly, the closer the site is to a mission the more likely it is to have a significant number of European goods. Conversely, a dearth of European trade goods is common at most Hasinai farmsteads (table 4.1). Even extensively excavated sites such as the Deshazo site (41NA27) do not have substantial collections of European goods compared with the missions (Perttula et al. 2010; Story 1982). The McElroy site has only one glass trade bead, and neither of the two sites nearest Mission Nasonis has European goods.

Table 4.1. European trade goods from historic Caddo sites and Spanish missions in East Texas. Site Trinomial 41CE354 41HO214 41NA15 41NA206 41NA21 41NA22 41NA23 41NA27 41NA44 41NA60 41RK200 41SA25 41SA94 41AN21 41CE20 41NA183 41SA116 41AG22 41CE293 41CE39 41CE48 41CE62 41NA111 41NA54 41NA6 41NA67 41RK191 41RK197

European Trade Goods

Investigation

Iron fragment and two gunflints Numerous items (beads, European ceramics, metal) Beads and metal Numerous items (beads, European ceramics, metal) Numerous items (beads, European ceramics, metal) One trade bead Unconfirmed reports Beads and metal None One trade bead and two gunflints Numerous items (beads, European ceramics, metal) Numerous items (beads, European ceramics, metal) Trade beads French clasp knife and gunflint Two trade beads None Numerous items (beads, metal) Unconfirmed reports Unconfirmed reports None Two gunflints None None None None One trade bead and brass tinkler None None

Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Extensive excavations Minor excavations Minor excavations Minor excavations Minor excavations Surface collection Surface collection Surface collection Surface collection Surface collection Surface collection Surface collection Surface collection Surface collection Surface collection Surface collection

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The amount of trade goods, like other materials, is also a function of the extent of fieldwork. Significant work occurred at just less than half of the sites under consideration. As expected, the largest collections of trade goods come from these sites (see table 4.1). The remaining site collections are the result of surface surveys or minimal work, which have very few or no European trade goods and are among the smallest samples of ceramic vessel sherds. Context is another important factor in the recovery of European trade goods. A good example is the materials from the Deshazo site, which document the bias for trade goods in mortuary assemblages (Story 1982). Extensive excavations recovered few European trade goods in the village and domestic contexts, which begins around AD 1650 and lasts until the early part of the eighteenth century, but various items were recovered from the associated cemetery. We may never know exactly why trade goods occur more frequently in the burials, but it is clear that the Hasinai positioned them right alongside the ceramic vessels made for hundreds of years before contact. Burials at the Deshazo site contained glass beads, metal knives, and brass hawk bells, as well as sixteen intact vessels. Most of the historic Caddo cemeteries in the Neches and Angelina River basins are small, were utilized for brief periods, and have limited internal social differentiation. A range of ceramic vessel forms and styles along with European trade goods appears more or less equally across sex and age, suggesting little status differentiation. This reveals diverse “cultural practices, beliefs, and worldviews about what male and female adults and children needed in life and death and that there were cultural boundaries between Caddoan groups not regularly crossed by networks of personal and group contacts” (Perttula and Nelson 1998:396). Around half of the sites with large collections of Caddo vessel sherds have European trade goods. Regardless of the extent of work, in most cases, there is a dearth of these goods at the Hasinai sites. Of course, most of the materials considered in this study are from domestic settings, potentially contributing to the scarcity of trade goods. Typical inventories from Historic period Caddo sites that predate circa AD 1720 include glass trade beads and metal artifacts, among the first items the French brought and traded to the Caddo in the late seventeenth century (Cole 1975; Story 1982, 1995). It was not until the establishment of Spanish missions and presidios, along with French trading posts to the north and east, in the early eighteenth century that more dependable sources of European trade goods became available in East Texas (Loren 2001:68–70; Rogers and Sabo 2004:619). As noted, European goods are expectedly abundant on the known mission sites in the area. Other sites with numerous trade goods, including beads and various metal artifacts, particularly gun parts, horse gear, and knives, are

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likely to have later occupations. These include the Mayhew (41NA21), and Nabedache Azul (41H0214) sites, which are thought to have been occupied post-1720 and into the middle to late eighteenth century (Kenmotsu 1992; Perttula and Nelson 2006). Excavations at the Spradley site (41NA206) have also recovered numerous trade goods likely indicating a post-1720 occupation.

Caddo Ceramic Assemblages at the Missions and Historic Caddo Sites The Caddo produced finely made and distinctive ceramic goods, by far the most frequently recovered material remains from Caddo and mission sites. For example, the number of Caddo vessel sherds at Mission Dolores (n ≥ 5,600) and Mission Nasonis (n ≥ 9,300) far outnumber the European trade goods. Utility ware vessels, usually simple bowls and jars, were used in everyday functions such as the cooking, serving, and storage of food. These vessels are plain and wet paste decorated, and some of the largest are close to a meter in height. Generally, utility ware dominates the ceramic collections and has a “coarse temper, and usually lack burnishing, polishing, or slipping on interior and exterior vessel surfaces. Such vessel sherds are decorated with brushing and other wet paste decorative methods, including incising, punctations, appliquéd, and neck banded elements, either by themselves or in combination with one or more of these decorative methods” (Perttula and Nelson 2007:75). We used stylistic and technological attributes to characterize and compare collections with large samples of decorated vessel sherds. This includes the missions and their associated Caddo sites, as well as other historic Caddo sites. We used the rates of decorative classes listed by Perttula and Nelson (2007), as well as ratios related to plain and decorated sherds, to compare the collections. It has long been noted that the use of brushing in decorations increases through time in the study area (Perttula and Nelson 2007: table 4; Perttula et al. 2010). Accordingly, the rate of brushing is very high in most of the ceramics collections. Brushing is also present with every other type of decorative class. Brushing is less common for a few sites that likely date earlier in the Historic period, as well as for sites in the eastern part of the study area. Mission Nasonis, 41RK191, and 41RK197 all have high rates of brushing (74 percent–80 percent), the latter two sites higher than Mission Nasonis (table 4.2). Still, the three rates are comparable and much higher than the rates at Mission Dolores (1.5 percent) and the McElroy site (40 percent). Notably, Mission Dolores was established for the Ais, a group not affiliated with the Hasinai. This indicates brushing is related to group or ethnic preferences, as well as being time sensitive.

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Table 4.2. Rates of utility ware decorative classes from Mission Nasonis, Mission Dolores, and associated Caddo sites. Site Decorative Class Brushed decorations Brushed Brushed-incised Brushed-punctated Brushed-incised-punctated Brushed-appliquéd Brushed-appliquéd-punctated Incised Punctated Incised-punctated Neck banded Appliquéd Appliquéd-incised Appliquéd-punctated Lip notched-incised Pinched Total

41RK191

41RK197

41RK200

41SA25

41SA116

79.5% 0.9% 2.7% 0.5%

79.6% 1.9% 2.8%

74.0% 1.3% 0.5%

1.5%

39.6% 1.0% 0.4%

0.1%