St. Catherines : An Island in Time [2 ed.] 9780820339672, 9780820338019

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St. Catherines j @j@j@

published in association with the georgia humanities council

David Hurst Thomas

j @j@j@

St. Catherines An Island in Time with a new preface

the university of georgia press athens and london

Published in 2011 by The University of Georgia Press Athens, Georgia 30602 www.ugapress.org © 1988 by David Hurst Thomas Preface 2011 © 2011 by David Hurst Thomas All rights reserved. Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill Set in 11/15 Adobe Jenson Pro Printed digitally in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thomas, David Hurst. St. Catherines : an island in time / David Hurst Thomas ; with a new preface. p. cm. “Published in association with the Georgia Humanities Council.” Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-3801-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8203-3801-X (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (Saint Catherines Island, Ga.) — History. 2. Guale Indians — Missions — Georgia — Saint Catherines Island — History. 3. Missions, Spanish — Georgia — Saint Catherines Island — History. 4. Excavations (Archaeology) — Georgia — Saint Catherines Island. 5. Saint Catherines Island (Ga.) — Antiquities. I. Title. II. Title: Saint Catherines. E99.G82T48 2010 975.8'733 — dc22 2010026459 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-3967-2

Contents j @j@j@ Preface 2011 vii Preface 1988 xiii Acknowledgments xv 1. Some Fortunate Hunter 1 2. Georgia’s Invisible Spanish Heritage 3 The Black Legend 4 Lost Reminders of Spanish Georgia 6 3. Santa Catalina de Guale: Georgia’s Oldest Known European Settlement 11 The Guale Indians 12 4. How Mission Santa Catalina Was Rediscovered 17 First Clues 17 Space-age Technology to the Rescue 21 5. What Did Mission Santa Catalina Look Like? 33 Santa Catalina: Georgia’s Oldest Known Church 33 The Campo Santo (Cemetery) 37 The Friary (Convento) Complex 44 6. New Light on Georgia’s Unwritten Past 49 The Poverty Paradox 49 The Preferred Hispanic Design for New World Living 58 Timeline of Significant Historical Events, St. Catherines Island, Georgia 67 Discussion Questions 71 Endnotes 73 Glossary 75 Suggestions for Further Reading 81

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Preface 2011 j @j@j@ This little book was first published in 1988. Since then, we have continued to explore the archaeology of St. Catherines Island. Let me tell you about some of the most important new discoveries. An Island in Time documents how we found the long-lost mission of Santa Catalina de Guale, which for a century served as the northernmost Spanish settlement along the eastern seaboard. After British and native forces overran the island in 1680, the mission site simply disappeared. We spent five years looking for the ruins, and as fate would have it, I’d driven over the site hundreds of times — it was buried beneath the westernmost road on St. Catherines Island. For the next fifteen years, we excavated what was left from this sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Franciscan mission. At first, we concentrated almost exclusively on the central mission quadrangle—the church, the central plaza, the friary, and the mission kitchen. Later, we excavated in the Native American village (pueblo) surrounding the central mission complex. We stopped digging in the mid-1990s. More than 90 percent of the Mission Santa Catalina site remains still buried and untouched; we felt it was important to conserve this part of the past for the future. Enlightened stewardship by the St. Catherines Island Foundation insures that the island will be spared destructive development, and we believe the site will survive for future generations. It’s a truism that archaeologists need a month in the lab for every day spent digging. That’s certainly true for Mission Santa Catalina. For the past two decades, our research team has analyzed and conserved the recovered artifacts in the laboratories of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. We have also published several books and scientific articles describing what we have learned, with more to come. In this brief preface, I’d like to outline some of the more important conclusions about mission life on St. Catherines Island. In the final chapter of An Island in Time, I talked in 1988 about the “poverty paradox,” raising the question of why remote Mission Santa Catalina

contained such unexpected riches when it was the outpost of “poor little St. Augustine,” one of the more remote and impoverished outposts on the frontier of the Spanish world — an outpost of an outpost. I offered some suggestions and hypotheses to explain these extraordinary finds. Two decades later, let me add a few more pieces to the puzzle. The earliest speculations about the Spanish missions of Georgia came from the Borderlands school of history championed by the University of California historian Herbert Eugene Bolton. Eager to dislodge some prevailing biases from United States history — looking at our history through Anglo-colored glasses — Bolton and his legion of students fought hard to overturn stereotypes of the “Black Legend” (discussed in chapter 2 of An Island in Time) by playing up the most positive aspects of Spanish colonial policy. But while correctly promoting a more realistic appreciation of Spanish colonial history in Georgia, Bolton and his students reiterated another, even more specious stereotype. The Borderlands historians totally failed to appreciate the role of native people in early Georgia history, typically discrediting and dismissing Native Americans as peripheral to the colonial experience — merely “children,” “untamed savages,” and “Borderland irritants.” We now appreciate the fallacy in that thinking. No longer do historians and archaeologists automatically accept documentary evidence at face value as “eyewitness accounts” proving the dominance and control of the Spanish over the native populations of Georgia. We also question the Myth of Poor Little St. Augustine. Spanish colonists typically self-characterized La Florida as a place of poverty, neglect, and ruin. But the combined results of recent ethnohistoric and archaeological investigations demonstrate this self-evaluation is only partially valid. It is true that Spanish Florida lacked the gold, silver, and other valuables found in many colonies in Mesoamerica and South America. The value of St. Augustine was strategic — to guard the sea routes of the Bahama channel as Spanish ships sailed home with the treasures of the Americas. External supply was difficult during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leaving the citizenry of St. Augustine with too many impoverished military families and not enough farmers to work the land. As an ill-supplied garrison town, viii @ preface 2011

St. Augustine quickly developed a reputation as, in the words of archaeologist and ethnohistorian John Worth, a “wretched frontier town to which few colonists would relocate willingly.” This is why St. Augustine came to rely so heavily upon the human and natural riches of La Florida. The economics of Spanish Florida depended upon an elaborate exchange network through which native populations channeled their surplus food (primarily maize) and labor into the colonial capital. To facilitate the flow, Spanish authorities dealt directly with the traditional indigenous chiefs, reinforcing their political power and cementing alliances with diplomatic gifts. At missions like Santa Catalina de Guale, Franciscan friars helped establish and maintain what was essentially an economic and political center, with hereditary Guale chiefs retaining enormous power and autonomy over secular matters. The paramount chiefs ruled according to age-old lines of inherited authority. Because the missionaries were restricted largely to matters of religion, they were relegated to a subordinate role. In this way, the Franciscan friars functioned in quite the same manner that indigenous religious leaders had done for centuries before European contact — ranking well below the chiefly authority figures who were born into their positions of power. Chapter 5 in An Island in Time documents the extraordinarily rich artifacts we recovered at Mission Santa Catalina. But when I wrote that chapter more than twenty years ago, I didn’t really understand where this wealth came from or what it meant. Now that we understand more about the power and authority of traditional Guale leadership within the Spanish missions of Georgia, we can appreciate (1) the ability of indigenous people (as mission neophytes) to produce surplus maize crops, (2) the mission’s pivotal role as a provincial capital and administrative center, and (3) the immediate access to the trade routes along the coast. Long known as the breadbasket of St. Augustine, Mission Santa Catalina de Guale provided the bulk of the corn that supplied that presidio town. During much of the mission period, native people of coastal Georgia engaged in an extensive and lucrative exchange system that extended throughout the reach of legitimate Spanish interests and likely far beyond. In The Beads of St. Catherines Island (2009), Elliot Blair, Lorann S. A. preface 2011

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Pendleton, and Peter Francis describe the nearly 69,000 glass trade beads recovered from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. It is quite remarkable that, despite the isolation and alleged poverty of Spanish Florida and Georgia, the Guale Indians of St. Catherines Island enjoyed access to some of the most valuable beads from around the world. Most beads were manufactured in the major European centers, with Venice being the most important, followed by France and (to a lesser degree) by Spain itself. Each region of Spain supplied beads to Mission Santa Catalina, including Andalusia (segmented and perhaps gilded beads), Cataloñia (glass crosses), Galicia (jet), and perhaps Castile (cut crystal). Beads also came to coastal Georgia from Holland, the Baltic region, and Bohemia. The Guale Indians even traded for Chinese beads and carnelian from India. Isn’t it remarkable that a small, isolated mission on the edge of the global Spanish empire could tell us so much about the rest of the world? And who would have thought that studying beads from this tiny settlement on the Georgia coast — an outpost of an outpost — would help us understand that global exchange network? In another newly published book, Mission and Pueblo Santa Catalina de Guale, St. Catherine’s Island, Georgia (U.S.A.): A Comparative Zooarchaelogical Analysis (2010), Elizabeth Reitz, Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, Daniel Weinand, and Gwyneth Duncan discuss the food bones recovered from our excavations at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, highlighting the dynamic interchange between natives and immigrants that resulted in new, hybrid subsistence patterns. We were shocked to learn how much the Spanish dietary patterns changed in comparison to those of the Guale Indians living at the mission. We now know that the mission Guale supplied foods to Spaniards in great quantities, effectively augmenting and expanding the European menu to look more like traditional, precontact Guale fare. Who would have suspected that the residents of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale enjoyed a much higher standard of living than did either Spanish citizens or Franciscan friars living in contemporaneous St. Augustine? Historians have long emphasized the unique Hispanic agenda — not seeking unoccupied land for immigrants, but rather looking for local native groups to create (from scratch) new multiethnic communities. To be sure, x @ preface 2011

military and political forces backed up this strategy, but the vision was to foster communities that were more native than Spanish. Recent ethnohistoric and archaeological investigations clearly demonstrate the degree to which that agenda played out during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish Florida. As part of a complex, multiethnic community, the indigenous chiefdoms of La Florida — willingly or not — became enmeshed in major global issues of climate change, epidemic disease, warfare, and food shortages. The reverse was also true: Europeans living in Spanish Florida became participants — again, willingly or not — in the local political dynamics of indigenous chiefdoms. Chapter 3 of An Island in Time tells the story of the bloody so-called Juanillo Revolt of 1597 — played out in large measure at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. Relying on the conventional historical thinking of the day, I wrote in 1988 that “the 1597 revolt climaxed nearly three decades of friction between Native American belief and Hispanic colonial policy.” But I got the story wrong. In their soon-to-be-published Politics, Murder and Martyrdom in Spanish Florida: Don Juan and the Guale Uprising of 1597 (2011), Michael Francis and Kathleen M. Kole report the results of their exhaustive study of original Spanish documents. They discovered that the Guale uprising on St. Catherines Island and elsewhere was not a wholesale indigenous rebellion against Spanish authority. Instead, the root cause turned out to be the underlying tensions and competition between indigenous Georgia chiefdoms, each jockeying for position and astutely playing the Spanish to further their own localized political purposes. Francis and Kole’s research highlights the serious limitations and sometimes tenuous footing of Spanish rule in Georgia and Florida. This study also underscores the importance of Indian allies to Spanish ambitions, as well as the bitter disputes between the officials of St. Augustine, both secular and religious. Further, this new book provides unique insights into the rich and complex nature of Indian society in the colonial southeast during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As I write these words, we are still analyzing the massive artifact collection from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, and we have several more books to write. But in the meantime, I am pleased to announce that the Edward John preface 2011

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Noble and St. Catherines Island foundations have generously donated the entire archaeological collection from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale — and all other archaeological artifacts from the island excavated prior to the year 2000 — to Atlanta’s Fernbank Museum of Natural History. In this way, this extraordinary piece of early Georgia history can be enjoyed and studied by the modern people of Georgia. David Hurst Thomas american museum of natural history october 2010

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Preface 1988 j @j@j@ Early in 1680, Captain Francisco de Fuentes rallied his band of five Spanish soldiers and fifteen neophyte Guale Indian musketeers to protect the Santa Catalina de Guale mission from attack by British officers commanding hundreds of Anglophile Yuchi Indians. Outnumbered by nearly twenty to one, Fuentes and his makeshift Spanish militia nevertheless managed to defend the mission against the British invaders. But immediately following the siege, Fuentes, the missionaries, and the Guale converts — not knowing that Governor Salazar had already dispatched reinforcements, fifty-four of the best-equipped troops from St. Augustine —abandoned the outpost. The small Spanish group fled southward, ultimately reaching the more hospitable town of St. Augustine. Salazar, Governor General of La Florida — the Spanish name for eastern North America—had lost Santa Catalina, the northern extension of Spanish domination on the Atlantic seaboard. Control of coastal Georgia was essential to insure safe passage of the Spanish fleet, heavily laden with the golden booty of New World conquest. Now, French and British forces, already poised along the north Atlantic coast, would be free to launch their corsairing pirates on the defenseless Spanish cargo ships. The abandonment of Mission Santa Catalina marked the waning of Spanish power in the American Southeast and presaged British domination of the eastern colonies. Not long after the Spanish retreat, in 1687, a small British force commanded by Captain Dunlop landed on St. Catherines Island. The captain described the scene: “We came about noon to the North/East of St. Catherina . . . where the great setlement was we see the ruins of severall houses which we were informed the Spanish had deserted for fear of the English about 3 years ago; the Setlement was Great.” Captain Dunlop’s journal provides the last known account of the Santa Catalina mission. The dearly defended church, the convento, the barracks, and the rest of “the great setlement” fell to the crush of hurricane-tossed soil and the root force of saw palmetto. The once-sacred mission ruins were overgrown first by loblolly and

long-leaf pine, then by scraggly gum and bay laurel, and finally by stately live oak, encrusted with (appropriately enough) Spanish moss. In 1680, Santa Catalina de Guale was a mission abandoned. Within a few decades, Santa Catalina became a mission lost. Three centuries later, I led an archaeological expedition to search for Mission Santa Catalina. Established less than seventy-five years after Columbus first set foot on New World soil, Santa Catalina has much to tell of Georgia’s past, about the head-on collision of Native American and Old World culture. This small book tells the story of how we found that lost mission, and what we learned once we found it.

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Acknowledgments j @j@j@ I express my sincere thanks to the Trustees of the St. Catherines Island and Edward John Noble Foundations, for providing both the opportunity and the support to conduct the archaeological research described here. We are particularly grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Y. Larkin for their truly extraordinary level of interest and benefaction. Few research projects have ever enjoyed the intellectual freedom and enthusiastic approbation provided by the Larkins in support of our efforts on St. Catherines Island. Additional funding for excavations and analysis has been provided by the Richard K. Lounsbery Foundation, the Georgia Humanities Council, Donald McClain, the James Ruel Smith Fund, the Sander and Ray Epstein Charitable Foundation, Inc., the General William Mayer Foundation, the Ogden Mills Fund, and Earthwatch. We thank Douglas DePriest for his seminal role in preparing the documentary, “St. Catherines: An Island in Time.” Doug not only pulled together a first-rate video, but also showed an extraordinary degree of sensitivity for the ongoing archaeological research. I also thank Dr. Ronald Benson, Executive Director, Georgia Humanities Council, for his role in generating both support and enthusiasm for the project. The staff of the Georgia Humanities Council also provided valuable assistance. I appreciate the efforts of those who assisted in administrating archaeological research on St. Catherines Island. Royce Hayes, superintendent of St. Catherines Island, made our work both effective and pleasurable. We also thank the staff of St. Catherines Island for always being willing to lend a hand: Aaron Crews, Thomas Fanning, Mike Harper, Stephen Holley, R.T. Myers, John Robbins, and Jack Waters. Each assisted throughout the project, especially helping to keep the machinery running and clearing vegetation from the site of Santa Catalina. John Toby Woods, the previous superintendent, contributed significantly to the early success of our Santa Catalina research.

We especially thank Most Reverend Bishop Raymond Lessard (Savannah Diocese) for his cooperation in resolving the reinterment issue, and for supervising the affecting ceremony “Reblessing the Ground and Re-burial of Remains” held in the cemetery at Santa Catalina on May 25, 1984. We are likewise grateful to other members of the Historical Commission in the Cause of the Georgia Martyrs for their support and participation: Reverend Alexander Wyse, O.F.M., Reverend Francisco Morales, O.F.M., Dr. F. Lamar Pearson (Valdosta State College), and Dr. Edward Cashin (Augusta College), Sister Mary Laurent Duggan and Gillian Brown of the Chancery, Diocese of Savannah assisted greatly in the reconsecration ceremony. I am especially grateful to the special people on the staff of the St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project: Stacy Goodman, Deborah Mayer O’Brien, Lorann S. A. Pendleton, Debra Peter, Anna Semon, Ginessa Mahar, Christina Friberg, Matthew Sanger, Elliot Blair, Matthew Napolitano, Rachel Cajigas, Jason Sherman, Eric Powell, Dr. Rachel Goddard Griffin, Lee Ullman, and Chelsea Graham all contributed markedly to the success of the fieldwork and ongoing analysis. Dr. Amy Bushnell has contributed significant, assiduous historical research. Nicholas Amorosi made illustrations of all the artifacts, and Dennis O’Brien is responsible for the remaining graphics in this volume. Lorann Pendleton and Debra Peter offered suggestions on the manuscript and also assisted in drawing together the discussion questions. Margot Dembo helped with the discussion questions, prepared the glossary, and handled most additional editorial chores.

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Chapter One

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Some Fortunate Hunter If some unwitting hands have not pulled them down, if they were not built entirely of wood, if the weather had not beaten too fiercely through the centuries, or if the streams have not innundated them, some fortunate hunter may yet stumble upon the mission remains of Santa Catalina de Guale. . . . Although at the time of the coming of the English, Santa Catalina was the most important of the Guale missions, the fierceness of the struggle in this region may have led the Yamasees and the English to treat it as the Romans did Carthage. john lanning, The Spanish Missions of Georgia

As luck would have it, that “fortunate hunter” turned out to be me. Three hundred years after Santa Catalina disappeared, our team of talented archaeologists rediscovered Georgia’s most important Spanish mission. Like historians and archaeologists before us, we felt that the lost Mission Santa Catalina lay on St. Catherines Island, a 14,000-acre tract about fifty miles south of Savannah. Among the so-called Golden Isles, St. Catherines Island is one of the few that have not been subdivided and suburbanized. The Georgia-based, not-for-profit St. Catherines Island Foundation owns the island and strictly regulates a comprehensive program of research and conservation. This enlightened and progressive land management policy insured that Mission Santa Catalina not be destroyed by the crush of condos and fast-food joints which typify too many of the southern barrier islands.

The Spanish mission system of coastal Georgia, as interpreted by historian John Tate Lanning in 1935 in The Spanish Missions of Georgia. (Reproduced with permission of the University of North Carolina Press.)

Chapter Two

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Georgia’s Invisible Spanish Heritage Today, the Spanish mission is a highly visible feature of America’s western landscape, the mission heritage still an integral part of life. In fact, growing up in California, the first archaeological site I ever visited was Mission Santa Clara, near San Jose. But twelve years ago, when I first came to Georgia to conduct archaeology on St. Catherines Island, I was astonished to learn that a Franciscan mission had once existed there. I had never heard of Santa Catalina de Guale, and I was totally unaware of the extensive mission system that flourished throughout Spanish Georgia and Florida in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. After some background research, I found out that in the middle of the seventeenth century, the Spanish mission system in the American Southeast (what the Spaniards founded as La Florida in 1565) had perhaps 70 Franciscans serving approximately 25,000 Indians in 38 missions. At the same time, 26 friars were operating 50 or so missions in the Southwest. In 1830, immediately prior to secularization, 60 friars were preaching to 18,000 Indians in the 21 Franciscan outposts that formed the links in the 650-mile-long chain of missions in Alta California. The numbers tell the story. The southeastern mission system was founded earlier, involved more people, and lasted longer than the southwestern system which is so familiar to Americans. Yet America’s perception of its past has conveniently blotted out the Spanish missions of Georgia, despite their former importance. Few people realize that Georgia and Florida once boasted a string of missions fully comparable to their better-known western counterparts.

Historian Mark Boyd’s idealized reconstruction of a typical mission chapel in La Florida. (Reproduced from Here They Once Stood by M. F. Boyd, H. G. Smith, and J. W. Griffin (Reproduced with permission of the University of Florida Press.)

The Black Legend America’s cultural amnesia can be attributed to factors both complex and varied. Sixty-five years ago, historian Herbert Bolton argued that United States history is written almost exclusively from the standpoint of the English colonies of the Northeast. This systematic historical bias has fostered a persistent leyenda negra, a “Black Legend” that, for nearly four centuries, has systematically overlooked and belittled Spanish achievement. An 1892 American history textbook provides us with a particularly succinct, if unwitting, sketch of the Black Legend: The Spaniards were brave, and they could rule with severity. But they thirsted for adventure, conquest, and wealth, for which their appetite was early encouraged; their progress in Mexico, Peru, and the West Indies had 4 @ c ha p t e r t wo

been too rapid and brilliant for them to be satisfied with the dull life and patient development of an agricultural colony. . . . Their aims were sordid, their State was loosely knit, their commercial policy was rigidly exclusive, their morals were lax, and their treatment of the savages was cruel, despite the tendency of the colonists to amalgamate with the latter, and thus to descend in the scale of civilization.l

This conventional textbook wisdom portrays Spain’s colonies in the American southland as second-rate foils to the more noble British colonies. The Black Legend contrasts Spanish language, law, religion, and worldview, always unfavorably, with those of the English. The insidious Black Legend derives from four mistaken premises: 1. Spaniards were never true colonizers in the New World; only the English set out to establish permanent colonies. The Spanish are perceived as interested not in settling, but solely in “glory, God, and gold.” 2. Spaniards contributed little, if anything, of lasting value to New World civilization. 3. The Spanish were not only exceptionally cruel in the conquest of the Americas, but they consistently refused to engage in manual labor, especially agriculture. 4. Something in the Spanish national character fostered bigotry, pride, and hypocrisy.

This distorted perception seems not to have changed significantly over the past six decades, and may explain in part why Georgia’s Spanish missions have been forgotten. The United States still seems to prefer viewing its own history through Anglo-colored glasses. The Black Legend remains a Pan-American blight. But other factors, specific to the American Southeast, keep Georgia’s early Hispanic heritage a mystery. One complicating factor is the obvious lack of historical and social continuity. Whereas the American West is still home to substantial populations of Spanish-speaking Native Americans (many of whom remain at least nominally Catholic), Hispanicized Native Americans disappeared from Georgia’s shores in the seventeenth century. By the 1750s, only two small vilg e org i a's i n v i s i bl e spa n i sh he r i tage

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lages of Christianized Indians remained outside St. Augustine. When the Spaniards turned over rule to the British in 1763, the eighty-three surviving Native American converts fled from Florida as well. The people of Georgia’s Spanish missions left no descendants to keep the traditions alive.

Lost Reminders of Spanish Georgia Architecture and archaeology also conspire against this aspect of Georgia’s past. Spanish mission sites and their conspicuous ruins litter the landscape of the American West. Each year, thousands tour mission ruins at National Monuments such as Pecos, Quarai, Abo, Gran Quivira, and Tumacacori. Still-active mission churches are highly visible at Taos, Zuni, Laguna, and Acoma pueblos. The “Mission Trail” connects the Alamo (itself a former Spanish mission) to three other eighteenth-century missions within the city limits of San Antonio and another just over the city line. Each of the twenty-one Alta California missions can today be visited: fourteen are now parish churches, three have become museums, one houses a seminary, another is a university chapel, and two are State Historical Parks. Religious services are regularly held in all but two. The physical mission presence throughout the West has inspired significant architectural “revivals” which further enhance the visibility of western missionization. In contrast, the architectural legacy of the eastern United States is decidedly non-Spanish, and for good reason. In the late nineteenth century, when an expanding middle class drifted away from Victorian excess to embrace more properly “American” forms, many turned to the homes of early American colonists for inspiration. Countless seventeenth- and eighteenth-century (British- and Dutchderived) houses survived along the eastern seaboard, providing architectural roots that ultimately fostered the widespread Dutch and Colonial Revival styles. Post-Victorian architecture evolved along a very different pathway in Alta California, where colonial precedents were largely Spanish. Although eighteenth-century mission structures were falling into disrepair, publicspirited citizens had begun to clamor for their restoration by 1880. Hundreds 6 @ c ha p t e r t wo

of tourists were already undertaking California mission pilgrimages by the turn of the century. The evolution of Mission Revival architecture and the restoration of Franciscan prototypes proceeded hand in hand, defining the romantic mission style that has become a lasting cultural tradition in California. In the Southwest, where earlier forms were more Native American than strictly Spanish, post-Victorian architecture followed parallel lines. Since Native Americans had supplied most of the material and labor in New Mexico, Spaniards adopted the distinctive Pueblo Revival style more from necessity than choice. Although surely Spanish to some degree, the characteristic low silhouette, massive pillars, and proportions of southwestern buildings derived largely from limitations in aboriginal adobe technology. As in California, this overwhelmingly popular architectural style insured the survival of the mission as institution in the American Southwest. But what happened to the Spanish missions of Georgia? For a time, some professional historians and many interested citizens associated Georgia’s tabby ruins with the long-lost missions. These abandoned oystershell buildings rekindled a romantic spirit among many who eagerly attributed them to seventeenth-century Franciscan missionaries and their Guale converts. During the 1930s, photographs and reconstructions of Georgia’s so-called “Spanish ruins” cropped up in newspapers (including a double-page rotogravure in the Atlanta Constitution and a feature story in The New York Times), magazines such as National Geographic, and even scholarly volumes (especially the influential Debatable Lands by Herbert Bolton and Mary Ross). A mini-land boom erupted in coastal Georgia.“With Spanish architecture, with puffing publicity through the press, and with adroit salesmanship, the tabby ruins have been held as a unique asset for exploitation to attract tourists and prospective purchasers.” The extensive tabby ruins at St. Marys were identified as the remains of Mission Santa Maria, and tabby walls on Elizafield Plantation, as the ruins of Santo Domingo de Talaje. Structures still standing on Sapelo Island were seen as the San Jose mission, barracks, and fortifications. Identification of tabbies as Spanish missions raised some eyebrows in Georgia’s historical community. But the “tabby question” positively electrified the membership of the Colonial Dames of America. Such a complimentary g e org i a's i n v i s i bl e spa n i sh he r i tage

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A highly speculative reconstruction of Mission Santa Maria by the artist Willis Physioc. According to historian John Tate Lanning, “a permanent tabby edifice . . . the best preserved mission-type ruins in Georgia, the square detached columns, and the perfectly preserved two-story wall . . . now stand at their full height in Camden County, near St. Marys, Georgia.” Shortly after this drawing was published, it was discovered that this tabby ruin could not possibly date from the Spanish mission period. All tabbies on the Georgia coast, beyond a doubt, are remains of nineteenthcentury antebellum structures, not Spanish missions. (Reproduced from The Spanish Missions of Georgia by J. T. Lanning with permission of the University of North Carolina Press.)

vision of early Spanish culture in the American southland “seemed to endanger the purity and reliability of history.” Everyone knows that America’s colonial history began at Roanoke, Plymouth, and Jamestown — not at St. Augustine or the Sea Islands of Georgia. The Georgia Society of the Colonial Dames of America retained a committee, headed by historian E. Merton Coulter, to research the tabby question. Drawing together an impressive array of historical, architectural, and archaeological evidence, Coulter and his colleagues correctly concluded in 1937 that the tabby ruins of coastal Georgia resulted from nineteenth-century plantation construction. Not a single tabby in Georgia can be attributed to the Spanish period. Coulter’s work created a rift in academic circles and generated bold headlines in The Atlanta Constitution. The scholarship of Bolton and Ross was particularly targeted and harshly discredited. Safe in his California library, Bolton weathered the storm rather nicely. But native Georgian Mary Ross was devastated, taking the criticism so Willis Physioc’s romantic reconstruction of the mission well at Tolomato mission, on the mainland of the Georgia Coast. Note that the superstructure of the well was incorrectly depicted as made of oystershell tabby. (Reproduced from The Spanish Missions of Georgia by J. T. Lanning with permission of the University of North Carolina Press.)

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personally that she vowed never to publish another word. Although for the next three decades she continued her research on Georgia’s Spanish past from her home in Glynn County, she kept her vow and never again committed her ideas to print. The greater consequence of the tabby fiasco was that Georgia was, once again, left without its Spanish missions. The combination of flimsy construction methods, periodic fires and hurricanes, and British military superiority effectively erased the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century evidence of the Spanish presence from the Georgia landscape. The physical and social environments conspired against Georgia’s first European colonists. Not a single building, mission or secular, survived. The total absence of structural reminders allowed early Hispanic Georgia to slip from America’s historical consciousness. Understanding of the past has always been heavily conditioned by attitudes of the present. The early missions of Alta California, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona remain today highly visible. It is no coincidence that hundreds of volumes have been written on America’s western missions, and that dozens of these archaeological sites have been excavated. Nobody overlooks the “mission heritage” of America’s West. If the historical missions themselves are not enough, the countless “Revival” replicas keep that tradition alive. Such reminders disappeared from Georgia centuries ago. Both architectural visibility and historical continuity are lacking; only the barest outline exists today of how the extensive Spanish mission system operated in the American Southeast. Few mission sites have been excavated, and even fewer books have been written. Although archival research has great promise, it becomes increasingly clear that much of this history can be retrieved only from evidence preserved in a relatively intractable archaeological record.

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Chapter Three

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Santa Catalina de Guale georgia’s oldest known european settlement In September 1565, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established the capital of his Spanish colony in northeastern Florida. Today, St. Augustine is renowned as the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States. Early the following year, Menéndez turned northward to reconnoiter the Spanish holdings, and scout out fruitful locations for mission outposts. Menéndez viewed these missions as more than just religious edifices. Through such frontier settlements the Spaniards planned to effect fundamental reorganization of traditional tribal economies. By introducing new crops and European methods of cultivation, the missionaries would bring the Indians into the Spanish community. Where possible, scattered Native American groups would be brought together into settlements where instruction of all sorts could be provided. The missionary never lost sight of his primary objective, to effect religious conversion, but “it was also his aim to raise the aborigines from their primitive state, often characterized by a very low degree of culture, to that of civilized and responsible citizens of the Spanish empire. Lacking a sufficient number of colonists, the Spanish crown made use of the missions, together with the presidios which were established at strategic points, as frontier agencies to occupy and hold and settle its vast domains.” The mission became a pioneering frontier institution which, at least in theory, was designed to vanish with the advance of civilization. Spanish missions were to become secular parish churches, once sufficient political, social, and economic change had eliminated the need for them. When Menéndez founded St. Augustine, he instructed the new Jesuit order to commence evangelical work throughout the Georgia-Florida coast. Although the Jesuits failed, their energetic Franciscan successors built some of the first churches in what is now the United States, mastered numerous

native languages, and wrote the first dictionaries based on Indian dialects. Friars provided instruction not only in catechism, but also in music, reading, and writing. Father Pareja, stationed for years in La Florida, boasted that “we are the ones who are conquering and subduing the land.” With some justification, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century churchmen at St. Augustine argued that their success in controlling the Indians made them the indispensable instrument of frontier defense, far superior to military personnel. They not only influenced religious and social conduct within the colony, but also acted as primary agents in establishing new settlements, directing the construction of new defensive installations, and determining the focus of agrarian policy throughout Spanish Georgia and Florida.

The Guale Indians Georgia’s Guale Indians were among the first indigenous peoples met by Europeans exploring north of Mexico. After brief contact with the Spanish in 1526, this Muskhogean-speaking group had briefly encountered the French in 1562 – 1563. Then, beginning with the Menéndez entrada of 1566, the Guale were exposed to a lengthy, if episodic, era of Spanish colonization. By 1684, the gradual withdrawal of the Spanish to the south and the expansion of the British Carolina colony southward prompted relocation and reorganization of the vastly reduced Guale population. The Spanish had named the Guale Indians for the chiefdom centered at the principal town on the island of Guale (St. Catherines Island); the associated Franciscan mission eventually became known as Santa Catalina de Guale. St. Catherines Island may (or may not) have been an important settlement during the earliest phase of European contact; historians still debate the point. But there is no doubt that an important Guale town existed there by at least 1576. Due in part to the Jesuit withdrawal from La Florida, Spanish mission efforts had dwindled by this point. The year 1584 found only four Franciscan friars stationed in the southeast, and they spent most of their time attending to Spanish needs, with little time for missionizing the local Indians. In 1597, the Indians of Guale staged a major revolt which was partly played 12 @ c ha p t e r t h r e e

out on St. Catherines Island. The so-called Juanillo Revolt, earliest documented anticolonial rebellion in North America, began when a missionary on the mainland reprimanded Don Juanillo — a Guale Indian who was heir to the position of head mico — for having two wives. The Franciscan was killed, and the conflict quickly spilled over to St. Catherines Island. As historian Michael Gannon relates the story, Father Miguel de Auñon and a lay brother, Antonio de Badajoz patiently awaited their deaths when scouts informed the missionary that the rebel Indians were close by. Father Auñon celebrated Mass, and gave Holy Communion to Brother Antonio. Then on September 19, they, too, fell under the macana. Faithful Christian Indians buried their remains at the base of a towering wooden cross that Auñon had erected on the island. A military expedition sent afterwards by Governor Gonzalo Mendéz de Canzo exhumed the friars’ bodies and brought them back to St. Augustine where they were reinterred with great reverence.

This account derives from the testimony of Father Avila, who was captured and tortured as part of the Juanillo Rebellion. Avila spent nine months in captivity, functioning as a slave in the village of Tulufina, until, in June 1598, he was liberated by a Spanish military patrol and taken to St. Augustine. When Governor Canzo asked him to testify on the matter, Avila refused, invoking the immunity granted clerics. Years later, Father Avila went to Havana where, under Franciscan obedience, he wrote the account of his capture that is taken today as evidence of the Juanillo rebellion. Writing from his perspective as Franciscan historian, Maynard Geiger has argued: The Indian revolt of Guale was a desperate attempt to wipe out the Christian culture that had just taken root. Christian morality faced a hand-to-hand conflict with inveterate pagan custom. The attempt of the friars to replace simultaneous polygamy by Christian monogamy was to be accompanied by the shedding of blood. . . . If the heir to the caciquedom was to go on in open defiance of a fundamental Christian law, it would nullify to a great extent whatever efforts the missionaries made on behalf of Christianity. santa catalina de guale

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Escamacu (Santa Elena)

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st. catherines island

Sapala

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sapelo island

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cumberland island Puturiba San Pedro

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FLORIDA

The approximate location of Spanish-period towns and settlements along the Georgia coast. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History, St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project and J. Michael Francis.)

There is, however, ample evidence that the conflict went considerably deeper than this single event. The 1597 revolt climaxed nearly three decades of friction between Native American belief and Hispanic colonial policy. The revolt took the lives of five Franciscans along the Georgia coast, and King Philip III seriously contemplated abandoning the mission effort because of the loss of men and money. Six years later, Canzo made a personal visitation to the Georgia Coast to reassert Spanish dominion. He visited all the principal villages and succeeded in establishing peaceful relations with all the tribes. Canzo’s successor, Pedro de Ibarra, conducted another inspection of the Georgia coast, during which he founded missions on St. Simons, St. Catherines, and Sapelo islands. After resettlement of the missions in the early seventeenth century, Spanish hegemony remained unchallenged until 1670, when the English settled at Charles Town, South Carolina. The territory from there south to St. Augustine —the so-called “debatable land”—remained the scene of conflict between England and Spain until 1763. The Spanish missions of Georgia’s barrier islands became the first victims of this basically European conflict. In 1670 the English and Spanish agreed, through the Treaty of Madrid, that Britain might forever hold the areas in America (and the West Indies) that were already regarded to be in her possession. When conflicting interpretations resulted, the Spanish attempted to resolve the issue by sending an expedition to attack and destroy Charles Town, the southernmost British settlement. Although it destroyed Port Royal, the expedition was disrupted by storms and forced to retreat before even threatening Charles Town. The only tangible consequence of this episode was the establishment of a Spanish garrison on St. Catherines Island in 1673 and the beginning of a stone fort at St. Augustine. The year 1680 was a turning point as the English began a steady push down the coast and across the interior toward the Mississippi. “For a decade the English cloud hovered over Santa Catalina, guardian of the Guale border . . . the Guale missions were a menace, and the neophytes would make good slaves on Carolina plantations.” That year, a force of three hundred British-led Yamassee Indians appeared at Santa Catalina, apparently killing a few Christian Guale guards. The survivsanta catalina de guale

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ing sentries spread the alarm through the small fortified mission doctrina. The hastily organized defense force took refuge in the fortified mission church, where they withstood the siege for more than a day. Although the Guale had successfully held off the invaders, they were horrified by the attack and abandoned Santa Catalina immediately and completely. Retreating toward the relative safety of St. Augustine, they stopped first at Sapelo Island and then, in 1686, withdrew to the mouth of the St. Mary’s River. Although no formal war had been declared between England and Spain, the English had cleared the Georgia coast of Spanish missions, presidios, and influence. St. Catherines Island was largely abandoned in the early 1680s. Although seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century British travelers described the ruins of Santa Catalina, the mission site was “lost” soon thereafter. The failure of Santa Catalina was, in a real sense, the beginning of the end for the Spanish in the southeast.

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Chapter Four

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How Mission Santa Catalina Was Rediscovered At its seventeenth-century zenith, La Florida consisted of about three dozen Franciscan missions, organized into two major branches, each originating in the colonial capital of St. Augustine and snaking outward into the hinterlands. To the west lived the Timucuan, Apalachee, and Apalachicola Indians; to the north, toward St. Catherines Island, lay the Province of Guale. At least ten missions were located within the present State of Georgia (although the picture is considerably complicated by the relatively frequent mission moves throughout the seventeenth century). When we began looking for Santa Catalina, not a single mission site in Georgia could be securely identified archaeologically. Mission Santo Domingo de Asao probably was somewhere on St. Simons Island, but nobody knows where. The pre-1658 missions Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe de Tolomato and Tupique were in McIntosh County (but not necessarily at Fort King George, as many historians have claimed). San José de Zápala functioned on Sapelo Island for nearly a century, but so far archaeologists cannot pinpoint the location.

First Clues Historians and ethnographers have debated the whereabouts of Santa Catalina de Guale for decades. John Swanton, distinguished authority on the Native Americans of the southeast, thought that the principal town of Guale and its associated mission were initially established on St. Catherines Island in the spring of 1566. But in a more recent assessment of the same evidence, anthro-

The provinces and missions of La Florida at the time of Bishop Calderon’s visitation, 1674 – 1675. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

pologist Grant Jones argued that prior to 1575, the town of Guale was not on St. Catherines Island, but rather to the north, perhaps near Skidaway Island or maybe on Ossabaw Island. But there has never been any doubt that, by 1587, both the Guale chiefdom and the associated Franciscan mission existed somewhere on St. Catherines Island. The first solid clues to the whereabouts of Santa Catalina came in 1952, when as part of the Georgia Historical Commission inventory of Spanish mission sites along the Georgia coast, archaeologist Lewis Larson (now of West Georgia College) visited St. Catherines Island. Among the “good candidates for the location of a mission,” Larson listed one locality near Culapala Creek 18 @ c ha p t e r f ou r

Previous archaeological reconnaissance and excavations at Culapala Creek prior to American Museum of Natural History research. The configuration and location of the now-known mission structures have been added for reference. The 100-metersquare “Quads” are denoted by Roman numerals. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

on St. Catherines as the possible location of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. But he cautioned that “no final and conclusive identification of a mission site can be made until adequate excavation . . . has been undertaken.” Larson returned to test excavate this promising site several years later. The sample of potsherds recovered from Culapala Creek was mostly aboriginal wares dating to the historic period; the pottery of Spanish and Mexican manufacture was comparable to that from known mission sites in Florida. The Culapala Creek area looked promising, but no evidence of the mission buildings emerged in these limited tests. Three years later, this same area was “rediscovered” by John W. Bonner, how santa catalina was rediscovered

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who had been retained to write a historical overview of St. Catherines Island. Apparently unaware of Larson’s research, Bonner and Carroll Hart became curious in 1955 whether any signs of the mission could be found. Relying heavily on the 1687 Dunlop account, Bonner and Gaffney Blalock explored the western coast of the island and they were impressed with the huge quantity of historic period pottery washing out from the banks of Culapala Creek. They photographed several sherds of Hispanic manufacture, correctly concluding that the ruins of Santa Catalina were not far away. In April 1965, John W. Griffin (then Staff Archaeologist, National Park Service) visited St. Catherines Island to gather information regarding its eligibility as a Registered National Historic Landmark. He subsequently reported that “further work on the site of Santa Catalina mission is in some respects of the highest priority,” but he warned that given “the perishable nature of the structures themselves — they were of poles and thatch, not masonry — it can readily be seen that extensive archaeological work would be needed to pinpoint individual buildings of the settlement.” Between 1969 and 1971, the late Joseph R. Caldwell and students from the University of Georgia conducted three seasons of archaeological fieldwork on St. Catherines Island. Although excavating mostly in mounds elsewhere on the island, the University of Georgia team sank several test pits in the shell deposits near Culapala Creek, not far from Larson’s previous excavations. Caldwell concluded in his unpublished fieldnotes, “There is no reason to believe, at present, that this is not the site of the mission of Santa Catalina. So far, however, our excavations have yielded little structural detail.” Such was the state of knowledge when I first visited St. Catherines Island in 1974. The combined French, English, and Spanish historic documentation supplied some vague geographic clues, and the limited archaeological evidence suggested only that the mission structures —if they had not washed away in the marsh years ago—were likely to be buried somewhere in the general vicinity of Culapala Creek, along the western margin of St. Catherines Island.

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Space-age Technology to the Rescue Virtually uninhabited, St. Catherines Island is blanketed with dense forests, briar patches, and almost impenetrable palmetto thickets. When we began looking for Santa Catalina, I was overwhelmed by the huge area involved. We knew so little that I did not feel confident enough to overlook any portion of the 14,000 acres of St. Catherines Island, so we began our search with a comprehensive program of reconnaissance and site evaluation. By its nature, archaeological fieldwork is slow and tedious, and we surely could not excavate an entire island, so we began by random sampling. This method required that the archaeological team walk a series of 31 east-west transects, each 100 meters wide. The crews attempted to follow a specific compass heading without deviating from the survey transect. This randomized approach forced us to look in the most unlikely, inaccessible places, even when we didn’t expect to find anything.

The systematic transect survey employed in the 20 percent regional sampling of St. Catherines Island. Each horizontal bar is 100 meters wide. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.) how santa catalina was rediscovered

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In effect, we generated a 20 percent sample of the archaeological record on St. Catherines Island by tramping through, over, or under nature’s obstacles — sidestepping tree snags, forging through palmetto thickets, briar patches, and inky swamps, hiking in the dubious company of ticks and chiggers, the yellow- and black-spotted spiders hanging from live oaks, to say nothing of the occasional rattlesnake and cottonmouth. Using this approach, American Museum teams discovered 135 mostly unrecorded archaeological sites, ranging from massive shell middens to small, isolated shell scatters. We then explored each site with two or more 1 meter-square test units, in all excavating more than 400 such test pits. Viewed from the air, the island looked like Swiss cheese, except that the holes were square. On the basis of these preliminary excavations, we know by extrapolation that St. Catherines Island contains between 650 and 700 archaeological sites. We also have a relatively unbiased data base from which to study the 4000 years of human history on the island. Controlled survey sampling also told us that sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Spanish-period ceramics occurred at only five of the 135 archaeological sites, clustered along the western marshes of the island. Our comprehensive regional data thus confirmed and complemented earlier archaeological investigations. The ruins of Mission Santa Catalina almost certainly lay buried within a target area the size of thirty football fields at the head of Culapala Creek. Even as our confidence grew, we were still forced to admit almost complete ignorance about what we were looking for. Did Santa Catalina survive merely as heaps of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century garbage? Or could we realistically hope to find evidence of buried buildings as well? Clearly it was time to begin digging. Looking around for better ways to find the needle hidden in this haystack, we learned of Kathleen Deagan’s successful search for sixteenth-century St. Augustine (buried beneath four centuries of later debris). Following her example, we purchased a gasoline-powered posthole digger and began excavating hundreds of round holes. With this noisy machine two people can dig a three-foot-deep hole in less than a minute. The power auger throws up a neat doughnut of dirt, to be hand-sifted for artifacts. 22 @ c ha p t e r f ou r

All overburden and fill from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale is screened through a 1/8-inch mesh power sifter. (Photograph by Lorann S. A. Pendleton, courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project .)

Field crew excavating one of the first test pits on the southern margin of Santa Catalina de Guale. (Photograph by Susan Bierwirth, courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

In effect, the simple and expedient auger testing narrowed our search area from thirty football fields to a target zone smaller than three acres. Although we found broken Guale Indian pottery almost everywhere we dug at Culapala Creek, diagnostic mission-period artifacts — mostly sherds of Hispanic majolica and olive jar — were largely restricted to a single, well-circumscribed area. In 1981, we defined this 100-meter-square area (prosaically known as “Quad IV”) as the most probable location for the central mission complex. Quad IV was a totally undistinguished piece of real estate, covered by the scrub-palmetto and live-oak forest typical along the western margin of St. Catherines. The only evidence of human occupation was a little-used field road for island research vehicles. Although shell-midden scatters could be seen here and there, Quad IV betrayed absolutely no surface clues of what lay below. At this point, we shifted field methods once again, switching from preliminary subsurface testing to noninvasive, nondestructive remote sensing. Strictly speaking, remote sensing applies only to various applications of photogrammetry. But in archaeological circles, “remote sensing” has come to embrace the variety of technology employed in geophysical observation, not only a broad range of aerial photography, but also a full spectrum of chemical and geophysical technology — including magnetometry, resistivity, groundpenetrating radar, and, most recently, analysis of differential heat loss. Choosing the right method depends on what one expects to find. What, exactly, were we looking for? For more than a century, Santa Catalina was the northernmost Spanish outpost on the eastern seaboard, and this historical fact implied considerable size and permanence. The seventeenth-century mission must have had a fortified church, some buildings to house the soldiers and priests, with granaries, storehouses, and dwellings sufficient for hundreds of Guale Indians. The auger tests had turned up a few clumps of fired daub, and we reasoned that the mission buildings were probably constructed by the wattleand-daub technique. Freshly cut timbers, set vertically along the walls, were reinforced with marsh cane woven horizontally between the uprights. This sturdy wattlework was then plastered (“daubed”) with a mixture of marsh mud, sand, and plant fibers (probably grass and Spanish moss). Roofs were thatched with palmetto. 24 @ c ha p t e r f ou r

Artist’s reconstruction of wattle-and-daub technique used to build Mission Santa Catalina. The upright wattlework is being “daubed” (plastered) with a mixture of marsh mud and organic fibers. (Reproduced from Here They Once Stood by M. F. Boyd, H. G. Smith, and J. W. Griffin with permission of the University of Florida Press.)

Three-dimensional (“birds-eye”) computer-generated map showing the results of proton magnetometer surveys across nine quads at Santa Catalina de Guale. Grid intervals are equal to 2 meters. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

So constructed, wattle-and-daub buildings are fully biodegradable. Left to nature, the roof usually goes first, either blowing away or simply rotting. Once exposed to the weather, the walls would wash away. Unfortunately, any archaeologist looking for such a melted mission would soon be out of business. But we were lucky: Santa Catalina burned when abandoned. The mud walls would have been fired and hardened, just like a pot baking in a kiln. Fired daub, nearly as indestructible as the potsherd, thus became a key to our search for Santa Catalina. But how to find chunks of fired daub buried beneath a foot of sand? It turns out that the marsh mud used to make daub plaster contained microscopic iron particles. When subjected to intense heat, the particles orient toward magnetic north, just like a million tiny compass needles. To pinpoint these magnetically anomalous orientations, we relied upon a proton precession magnetometer. The receiving part of the magnetometer is about the size of a transistor radio, worn in a reverse-backpack so the operator can see the readout despite the underbrush. Attached by an 8-foot cord is the sensor, a white device like a coffee can on an aluminum tent pole. The sensor is filled with a hydrocarbon-charged fluid, usually kerosene or alcohol. The protons in this fluid behave like tiny spinning magnets that can be temporarily aligned (polarized) by generating a uniform magnetic field from a wire coil inside the sensor. When this current is removed, the spin of the protons causes them to “precess” in the direction of the earth’s magnetic field, much as a spinning top rotates about a gravity field. An atomic constant (the “proton gyromagnetic ratio”) tells the magnetometer how to convert the frequency emitted by the spinning protons to a measurement of the earth’s magnetic intensity at that spot. The theory may be complex, but the principle is simple: magnetometers measure the strength of magnetism between the earth’s magnetic core and the sensor. When thousands of these readings are taken across a systematic grid, a computer plotter can generate a contour map reflecting both shape and intensity of magnetic anomalies beneath the ground surface. Many subsurface anomalies are archaeologically irrelevant magnetic “noise”— interference from underlying rocks, AC power lines, recent iron how santa catalina was rediscovered

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debris and the like. On some days, the earth’s magnetic field fluctuates so wildly that the readings are meaningless, and electrical storms can hopelessly scramble magnetometer readings. Even minor interference such as the operator’s wristwatch or eyeglasses can drive a magnetometer crazy. But when everything works just right, the magnetometer provides the equivalent of a regional catscan, telling archaeologists exactly what is going on beneath the earth’s surface. Many archaeological features have characteristic magnetic signatures, telltale clues that hint at the size, shape, depth, and composition of the archaeological objects hidden far below. Shallow graves, for instance, have a magnetic profile quite different from say, a buried fire pit or a wattle-and-daub wall. Ervan G. Garrison and James Tribble (both then associated with Texas A&M University) directed the first proton magnetometer survey on St. Catherines Island in 1981. After that, we did our own magnetometer work. Although some rather sophisticated computer-graphic technology is usually required to filter the magnetic survey data, the subsurface patterning at Santa Catalina was so striking that our remote sensing paid off significantly even before the computer plots were available. As the Texas A&M team packed up their field equipment to work up the data in their Texas lab, they shared some hunches, based strictly on the raw magnetometer readings: “If we were y’all, we’d dig in three places: right here, over yonder, and especially right here.” We explored these three magnetic anomalies in the few days remaining in our field season. One anomaly —“especially right here”— turned out to be a large iron ring. Excavating below this we found another ring, and another below that. At about nine feet down, we hit the water table. Digging underwater, we finally encountered a well-preserved oak well casing. Eureka! The magnetometer had found the long-lost mission well at Santa Catalina. Archaeologists love to find wells because, like privies, they tend to be first-rate artifact traps. After removing the bones of an unfortunate fawn (which had long ago drowned in the well), we found an array of distinctive Hispanic and Guale Indian potsherds and a metal dinner plate that had been dropped (or tossed) into the construction pit. All artifacts were typical 28 @ c ha p t e r f ou r

Initial test pit at the Spanish well of Santa Catalina. The topmost ring is partially exposed, surrounded by the construction pit of the seventeenth-century well. Six similar rings lay unexcavated below. (Photograph by Dennis O’Brien, courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries. We knew at that point that we had indeed found Santa Catalina, and we quickly pressed on, anxious to see what else the magnetometer could turn up. Our second magnetic anomaly—the one “right here”—was a small mound. We thought at the time it might be a grave or tomb. But after two days of removing overburden, we came across a burnt daub wall which, as it fell, had crushed dozens of Spanish and Guale domestic artifacts: imported enamelglaze cups, painted ceramic dishes, a kitchen knife, and at least two large pots for cooking or storage. Charred bones of deer and chicken, plus dozens of tiny corn cobs, still littered the floor. This time, the magnetometer had taken us into the kitchen of the convento, the modest home for the seventeenthcentury Franciscan friars stationed at Santa Catalina. Finally, we began digging in the “over yonder” anomaly, which proved to be a linear daub concentration more than forty feet long, obviously the downed wall of yet another, much larger, mission building. Here excavations turned up none of the everyday implements and debris so common in the burnt kitchen. Instead, we found human graves, the first of more than four hundred Christian Indians buried there. Our search was over. We had discovered the iglesia, the house of worship at Santa Catalina de Guale, one of the very oldest Christian churches known in North America. Magnetometer survey gave us accurate directions to the daub walls and the buried iron barrel hoops. Even without benefit of computer enhancement, the magnetometer had detected the very heart and soul of Mission Santa Catalina. These important landmarks could eventually have been found through extensive test trenching, but remote sensing proved considerably more cost-effective and less destructive. As our research unfolded, we found that additional remote sensing technology was useful in defining the configuration of the unexcavated mission buildings. In the spring of 1982, Gary Shapiro and Mark Williams conducted a pilot study to determine the potential and feasibility of soil resistivity survey at Santa Catalina. By monitoring the degree of resistance to electrical current, we could actually map the size, orientation, and configuration of the unexcavated buildings at Mission Santa Catalina. The projections from resistivity survey 30 @ c ha p t e r f ou r

Inspecting the results of the ground-penetrating radar survey at Santa Catalina. (Photograph by Dennis O’Brien, courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

were further tested against independent data from ground-penetrating radar studies. Our search for Santa Catalina illustrates the coming of age of American archaeology. Archaeologists have long learned strictly by tactile sensing; we learned by capture. The artifacts were the hard data of archaeology. The past was something to be dug up, measured, and displayed in a museum case. Today’s technological arsenal contains a dozen noninvasive, nondestructive techniques to assess the archaeological record. “Remote sensing” is simply another way to gather archaeological data —the data from unexcavated objects and features. That these things still lie beneath the ground is irrelevant.

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Chapter Five

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What Did Santa Catalina Look Like? Since the discoveries of 1981, we have been conducting detailed archaeological excavations at Santa Catalina. Because the excavations are ongoing, our conclusions must remain preliminary and tentative, but at least we can begin to sketch a picture of life in Georgia’s first known European colony.

Santa Catalina: Georgia’s Oldest Known Church We have completely exposed the outlines of the church (iglesia) at Santa Catalina and our interpretations are complicated by the fact that at least two churches are represented. We know from the historical documents that the sixteenth-century mission church was burnt to the ground in September 1597. These ruins were personally inspected by Governor Canzo, who had traveled north from St. Augustine to observe for himself the aftermath of the Juanillo Rebellion. After a period of abandonment, Santa Catalina was resettled by the Spanish in 1604, and the mission church was reconstructed (apparently on the sixteenth-century site). Although detailed stratigraphic relationships are still being worked out, “Structure 1” at Santa Catalina is, without question, the seventeenth-century church, abandoned shortly after the British siege in 1680. The church was constructed on a single nave plan, lacking both transept and chancel. This rectangular structure is 20 meters long and 11 meters wide. The church facade, facing southeast, was made entirely of wattle-and-daub. This wall, the only one built strictly of wattlework, was anchored to four round

uprights, set in shell-lined postholes and spaced on 3.7-meter centers. The facade probably supported a pointed gable, elevated to support a steep thatch roof (although it is also possible that, as in the California missions, the facade was a false front, projecting above the single-story construction of the nave). A cross probably graced the rooftop. The public entryway was centered in the facade wall which, when fired, fell toward the southeast (outward across the churchyard). The lateral church walls were constructed of both wattlework and pine planking. The nave portion, 16 meters long, was built entirely of wattle-anddaub which, when encountered archaeologically, consisted of a densely packed linear rubble scatter. Oyster shell appeared in places between concentrations of fired and unfired daub, suggesting that the nave walls toppled over after a period of formal abandonment during which a “squatter midden” apparently accumulated. The relatively straight margin of the northeastern edge of the wall suggests that the wall had decomposed down to a height of only about 1 meter when it toppled inward. The outside surface was whitewashed with a thin coat of lime plaster. The northwestern, sanctuary end of the church was defined entirely by wooden planking, apparently elevated above the lateral wattle-and-daub walls of the nave. This composite construction technique emphasized the symbolic separation between nave and sanctuary. While in service, the church at Santa Catalina was provisioned with the standard paraphernalia and supplies necessary for worship: silver chalices, missals, brass candlesticks, an altar lamp, plus an assortment of religious banners, engravings, statues, and paintings. This treasure-filled church required continual vigilance against both heretic and heathen. Pirates, intent on looting the sacred ornaments, images, and especially mission bells (which could be recast into cannons), repeatedly raided the churches of St. Augustine and the mission outliers. The precious and irreplaceable artifacts were jealously guarded by the priests, and most were undoubtedly removed when the church was abandoned. Sometimes, the heavier treasures — the larger bells, altarstones, and statuary — were even buried. Obviously, the archaeological record of an abandoned church can be expected to paint a most conservative picture of the riches once present in 34 @ c ha p t e r f i v e

active missions like Santa Catalina. You simply don’t expect to find many rosaries and gold watches in today’s town dump. But some clues of this former richness persisted at Santa Catalina. While excavating the ruins of the sanctuary, we found hundreds of shot-sized metal balls amidst the charred walls of the sanctuary. At first, we thought these might be musket shot fired into the church during the siege of 1680 (and some may be). But closer inspection revealed that some of the slag is copper and silver, unlikely constituents for shot. The sanctuary walls seem to have been adorned with a permanently affixed reredo, decorative metal panels which were not removed before the church was abandoned and subsequently torched. The mission friars wore richly ornamented vestments and linens while conducting services. When not in use, such liturgical garments were stored in the sacristy, an antechamber often constructed with built-in storage cabinets or shelving. At Santa Catalina, the clearly demarcated sacristy measured 5 meters wide by 3 meters deep, built on the Gospel side of the church (the lefthand side of the sanctuary as one faces the altar). This room was presumably also used for storing candles, processional materials, and other ritual items necessary to perform the Mass. Roman Catholic liturgical regulations — and a sense of architectural balance — further dictate that a second room must have been built on the opposite side of the altar to balance the sacristy, but at present we lack evidence for such a room. Inside the sacristy we found a cache of charred wheat grains, a rare find providing insights into the mechanism of seventeenth-century trade and religion. Wheat was first domesticated in the Old World, then imported by the Spanish colonists to the Georgia coast. To the Europeans, wheat bread was an indispensable item of diet, and wheat was among the foodstuffs listed on freight manifests from sixteenth-century La Florida. Despite inhospitable climate and soils, the Spanish colonists tried to grow wheat and other familiar grains in their earliest southeastern settlements — apparently without much success. By 1580, imported wheat had been largely replaced by maize grown locally or acquired from Indians. From the Spanish viewpoint, the situation improved during the sevenwhat did santa catalina lo ok like?

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teenth-century, when ranchers reported some success at raising wheat at the interior Apalachee and Timucuan missions. In 1675, Bishop Calderón reported excellent and abundant wheat grown at the inland Florida missions, “as alms for the missionaries and the needy widows.” The wheat recovered inside the church at Santa Catalina was probably destined to be baked into the host, flatbread essential for the Eucharist. Contemporary Catholic custom clearly specifies that only wheat be used for the Eucharist because “wheat bread is the staple food in the diet of most people.” While wheat probably never had assumed great dietary importance to Spaniards living at Santa Catalina, the wheat cached in the sacristy underscores the effectiveness of the Franciscan Order in obtaining the supplies necessary for the proper conduct of Church ritual— even on the most remote northern frontier of the Guale province. Fronting the church was a square shell-covered subplaza, measuring about 15 meters on a side. This churchyard (or atrio) was probably a low-walled enclosure demarcating the public entrance to the church. A ubiquitous feature of New World religious architecture, the churchyard served not only as a decorous entryway into the church, but also variously functioned as an outdoor chapel, an area to contain overflow congregations, and sometimes as a cemetery. The churchyard at Santa Catalina was surfaced with a bright white veneer of water-rolled marine shell, available from naturally occurring deposits scattered along the intracoastal waterway. These massive shell bars, accessible only by watercraft, today continue to provide building aggregate on St. Catherines Island. Low-level aerial photography disclosed another piece of surprising evidence, invisible as we excavated — a faint pathway leading through the atrio into the church doorway. This narrow line of crushed, compacted shell was created as thousands of shuffling feet moved in single-file procession to attend Mass at Santa Catalina. Church orientation was also a matter of both secular and sacred concern. The church at Santa Catalina was oriented along an axis of 45° west of north. The long axis of the church is parallel to the intracoastal waterway, the major route of transport along the Georgia coast. We know that in the late 36 @ c ha p t e r f i v e

seventeenth-century Captain Dunlop saw a mission compound surrounded by “much clear ground in . . . view for 7 or 8 miles together.” So situated, even a one-story wattle-and-daub church would have been easily visible for miles up and down the nearby intracoastal waterway. The brilliant whitewashed walls and shell-covered churchyard were deliberately designed to further enhance the visual and emotional impact of Georgia’s first church.

The Campo Santo (Cemetery) Beneath the nave and sanctuary of the church we discovered the only known cemetery at Santa Catalina, where approximately 400 – 450 Christianized Guale Indians were interred. In addition to the bones, the campo santo contained a truly astounding array of associated grave goods: four complete (and very rare) tin glaze majolica vessels, several stone spear points, a stone used to play the “chunky” game, a circular shell ornament with an engraved coiled rattlesnake motif, two complete glass cruets, a dozen crosses of metal and wood, ten small glass and gold leaf cruciform ornaments, ten bronze religious medals, one gold medallion, one silver medallion, two mirrors, fifteen finger rings, two hawk’s bells, one rosary, eight shroud pins, three copper plaque fragments, one clay tablet (with depictions of saints on both sides), one large piece of shroud cloth, and glass trade beads numbering nearly 70,000. Clark Spencer Larsen, a physical anthropologist now teaching at Ohio State University, supervised the excavation and analysis of the human remains at Santa Catalina. Recovering such skeletons was a slow and tedious process, requiring a skilled archaeological team working for three years. Roughly one-third of the skeletons were encountered in their original grave pits, usually buried face up, with feet toward the altar and hands across the chest or (less commonly) the abdomen. Because the cemetery was used for more than a century, the people eventually ran short of burial space. Time and time again, the excavators encountered partial interments, disturbed by later burials. The resulting grave fill contained thousands of isolated human bones and teeth, scattered in the process of adding the newly deceased to the church cemetery. In many cases, the moist, acidic soil had literally dissolved the thinner what did santa catalina lo ok like?

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Some crosses found in Christian Guale graves at Santa Catalina. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

Guale Indian human sculptures found at Santa Catalina. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

bones and teeth. Many bones were so soft and friable that they crumbled upon touch. Others had the consistency of creamy peanut butter. Most burials required immediate first aid upon discovery. After exposure, the bones were permitted to dry partially, then a plastic consolidant (polyvinyl acetate) was painted on in situ. Once stabilized, the bones could be gingerly transferred to the archaeology laboratory on the island, where they were completely cleaned and further conserved. Human bones provide us with yet another clue for understanding what life was like in early Georgia. The early Europeans had introduced diseases into the Native American populations. In some cases, the diseases traveled more rapidly than the explorers themselves, and epidemics continued throughout the Spanish mission period. We know, for instance, that when DeSoto first crossed Georgia in 1540, he found several large Indian towns literally abandoned and deserted: “great townes [were] dispeopled, and overgrowne with grasse, which shewed that they had been long without inhabitants. The what did santa catalina lo ok like?

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Indians said, that two years before there was a plague in that countrie, and that they remooved to other townes.” Elsewhere, DeSoto was told that “the previous pestilence had been more rigorous and devastating in this town than in any other of the whole province, and the few Indians who had escaped had not yet reclaimed their homes; hence our men paused but a short time in these houses before proceeding to the temple.” One simple outbreak of measles is said to have killed over 10,000 Indians in Georgia and Florida. The first Franciscans landing on St. Catherines Island were greeted by upwards of 1,000 Guale Indians. A century later, only a handful of Guale survived. Because of the cemetery excavations, we now have the opportunity to study, firsthand, the physical remains of the victims. Although our team of physical anthropologists is still conducting the paleoautopsies, we already have some illuminating clues about the epidemic diseases which bedeviled this local population. Many acute infections (such as smallpox, measles, and influenza) do not directly involve skeletal tissue (and hence leave no evidence for the archaeologist). But we can still learn much about such diseases through indirect means because severe infections tend to disrupt normal growth patterns. Rather than adding healthy new tissue, bones and teeth cease growing, forming distinctive “growth arrest lines.” In effect, our skeletons contain a memory bank encoding the history of major infectious disease episodes. Such subtle indicators — the so-called Harris lines on long bones and hypoplasia lines on teeth — permit physical anthropologists to reconstruct many of the disease histories encapsulated in the Santa Catalina burials. The human skeleton also encodes significant dietary information. Maize (corn) was the staple food of the Guale Indians living at Santa Catalina. Because this diet was deficient in essential amino acids, the overall level of nutrition was rather poor. Not only did the restricted diet cause severe problems in growth and development, but it also hampered the ability to fight infectious disease. In effect, the Guale battled both poor nutrition and diseases inadvertently introduced by Europeans. These bones have much to tell, and technology is becoming available to help unravel their story. But we must ask our questions with an appropriate 40 @ c ha p t e r f i v e

measure of dignity and respect for the dead. When we first discovered the Guale campo santo at Santa Catalina, we recognized it as a unique source of information. But before proceeding, we wished to ensure that the investigation be carried out in an appropriate manner. We felt it necessary at the start to determine the ultimate disposition of the remains. We therefore suspended excavations in the cemetery pending resolution of both matters. Our first step was to contact individuals of demonstrable biological, cultural, and/or religious affinity to the human beings interred there. Tracking down the biological descendants of the Santa Catalina Guale was fruitless. After the fall of St. Catherines Island in the 1680s, many Native Americans were removed closer to St. Augustine. Other Guale remained in the area, aligning with the British, and ultimately were absorbed by the Yamassee Indians. The last known reference to the Guale occurs in 1735, when Fray Tomas de Aguilar was reappointed “Professor of the Guale Language” at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, then located at Nombre de Dios, on the outskirts of St. Augustine. By the late 1750s only two small Indian villages remained near St. Augustine, and when the Spaniards departed the area in 1763, all 83 surviving Indians — the last surviving Guale presumably among them — left Florida with the Spaniards. Since we found no possibility of contacting survivors with a demonstrable biological link to the Guale, we redirected our efforts to determine which individuals or groups might have the closest cultural and/or religious affinity to the Guale at Santa Catalina. This proved to be a relatively easy task, since our initial test excavations indicated a mortuary pattern clearly mandated by sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury Catholic custom. The Guale Indians buried at Mission Santa Catalina, or at least their immediate families living nearby, had without question opted for Christian burial at the time of death. We view this decision, made three to four centuries ago, as an unequivocal statement of religious preference. On this basis, the contemporary Catholic Church became the most appropriate organization with which to discuss the ultimate disposition of the human remains. Accordingly, in September 1982, I contacted Father Raymond Lessard, what did santa catalina lo ok like?

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Bishop of Savannah. My first question dealt with the excavation: Is there any feeling within the Church that unearthing these remains would constitute a kind of desecration? Bishop Lessard assured me that the Catholic Church had no objections to our excavating the cemetery at Santa Catalina. In a letter, Bishop Lessard noted: I would say on the contrary, because it is part of an experience of human discovery . . . a cultural exploration, as long as the whole thing is done properly and with respect . . . For us as a religious community, it has an added significance. It tells us something about our roots, our spiritual roots as well as human or cultural roots, and that we are part of a community not only in space but also in time, with links to the past. Accumulating all this becomes what we will pass on to the future.

Moreover, in his view, the burial ground ceased to be consecrated when the missionaries and neophytes abandoned the site in the 1680s. The Church expressed a profound historical interest in the results of our excavations. As it turned out, the Franciscan Order had been simultaneously (and independently) investigating beatification for the five Franciscans killed in the Juanillo Rebellion. Significantly, two of these missionaries, Fr. Miguel de Auñon and Br. Antonio de Badajoz, had been martyred on September 17, 1597 at this very site. Although the formal beatification procedures, entitled “The Cause of the Georgia Martyrs,” actually began in the 1950s, it was not until late 1982 that Bishop Lessard, in whose territory the martyrdoms had occurred, was granted permission to proceed. He appointed a Historical Commission to prepare the necessary documentation for ultimate submission to the Pope. When Bishop Lessard, accompanied by two members of the Historical Commission, visited St. Catherines Island on May 16, 1983, he enthusiastically encouraged us to proceed with the cemetery excavations. Not only would such information generally enhance our knowledge of the early settlements of the Georgia coast, but the excavation could provide an untapped source of information relative to the Cause of the Georgia Martyrs. I also asked Bishop Lessard about the Church’s position on ultimate disposition of remains. After some discussion, we agreed on two points: (1) the 42 @ c ha p t e r f i v e

Bishop Raymond Lessard and Franciscan Fathers Adams, Wyse, and Morales conducting a service dedicated to “reblessing the ground and re-burial of remains” at Santa Catalina de Guale (May 1984; photograph by Dennis O’Brien, courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

most appropriate action would be respectful reburial after analysis, and (2) the most appropriate venue for reinterment would be the original cemetery itself. Acting on behalf of the St. Catherines Island Foundation, I agreed to this plan and, on May 25, 1984, Bishop Lessard returned to Santa Catalina to conduct a service dedicated to “reblessing the ground and re-burial of remains.” As part of the ceremony, he supervised reinterment of three Guale Indians in an excavated portion of the cemetery. The congregation of 120 people included members of the Historical Commission, three Franciscan friars, several representatives of the Savannah Diocese, the Boards of the St. Catherines Island and Edward John Noble foundations, two dozen participating archaeologists, and several historians of the period, as well as numerous prominent citizens of Liberty County. what did santa catalina lo ok like?

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We feel that this solution represents the most satisfactory course of action for all concerned. Additional remains will be reinterred as the biocultural analysis is completed.

The Friary (Convento) Complex Eastward, across the plaza from the church, stood the Franciscan convento. The convento (usually translated as monastery, convent, or friary) comprised one or more subsidiary buildings in which friars and lay brothers lived their cloistered lives, as regulated by the rules of their order. We found two superimposed conventos at Santa Catalina. The earlier building was built shortly after the Franciscans arrived on St. Catherines Island, sometime in the 1580s. This is the only known sixteenth-century European building in Georgia. Second only in size to the church itself, the early convento measured 16 meters long, and roughly 7 meters wide, the long axis running roughly northwest-southeast. Construction was entirely of rough wattle-and-daub, considerably coarser than that used for building the church. We think that both kitchen and refectory were housed inside the sixteenth-century convento. Other rooms were used as living quarters and storage. Kitchen debris and table scraps were tossed out the back door, where a fringe of shell midden accumulated against the rear wall, well out of sight from the church. Although perhaps a minor nuisance to the barefoot friars living there, this backyard midden did serve a useful function. When torrential Georgia rains hit the convento, driving gallons of rainwater off the thatched roof, the midden dispersed and drained the runoff. A clearly incised dripline demonstrates that the sixteenth-century convento had eaves extending about 1 meter beyond the rear wall. This early convento was burnt to the ground by rebellious Guale in 1597. When Fray Ruiz supervised the reconstruction a decade later, he apparently decided to separate secular from sacred, because a distinctive cocina was erected 20 meters to the north of the new convento. The detached kitchen 44 @ c ha p t e r f i v e

was also a common feature in urban St. Augustine. A barrel well was excavated between the two buildings, and a beaten path connected the well with a north-facing doorway of the friary. The southeastern walls of both conventos were built on the same location, but the later structure was somewhat smaller, measuring only 12 meters long, and 8 meters wide. Moreover, the long axis of the seventeenth-century convento is 325°; the 10° difference in orientation greatly facilitated separating the two buildings during excavation. The later friary consists of three well-defined daub walls and one less wellpreserved, accompanied in all cases by in situ wall posts. Because analysis continues, it is difficult to assign specific functions to individual rooms in the friary. The seventeenth-century convento was subdivided into several small rooms arranged around a central enclosure. A slightly larger room defined the southern end of the friary. This communal room, either the refectory or a library, was apparently heated by a circular charcoal brazier. A doorway passed directly from this room to the outside. Set into the clay floor of the central room was a curious rectangular clay pedestal, standing 25 centimeters above the floor, scooped out to receive an oval, metallic receptacle. This unique fixture remains a puzzle. Perhaps it once held holy water, but the location on the floor makes this unlikely. The feature may also have been some sort of Franciscan foot font, with slow-burning charcoal added to the central basin. Somewhat similar devices, sometimes elaborately decorated, were commonplace in nineteenth-century friaries in Spain, providing the focus of informal Franciscan gatherings. It is also possible that the floor feature served as a kind of wash basin. The Franciscans serving at Santa Catalina de Guale (and elsewhere throughout La Florida) wore no footgear. Writing to the King of Spain in 1635, Fr. Francisco Alonzo de Jesus wrote that “the friars suffered greatly in this mission field. They must walk barefoot in this cold land when going about from mission to mission.” Friar Antonio de Badajoz, who was martyred at Santa Catalina, was a lay brother of the Friars Descalcados, the Order of the Barefoot Friars. The western convento wall was enclosed by an arcade, probably a colonnaded porch faced the central plaza of Santa Catalina. This typically Spanish what did santa catalina lo ok like?

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construction contained at least three doorways opening toward the church to the west. This porch was exactly aligned with the western wall of the cocina (kitchen). The newer friary was about 15 percent smaller than its predecessor, but this size differential was more than counterbalanced by the new cocina built 20 meters to the northwest. The seventeenth-century kitchen, measuring 4.5 × 6 meters, was constructed of wattle-and-daub on three sides. These walls were supported by squared-off pine posts, placed in pits with a center-center distance of 230 centimeters. The southern end of the kitchen was apparently left open, presumably to facilitate both access and ventilation. Food storage and preparation was shifted into the new cocina building early in the seventeenth century. Friars were entitled to the same rations and compensation as soldiers, but because of their vows of poverty— Franciscans were forbidden to handle money—they preferred to receive their daily subsidy from the Crown in kind: two pounds of flour and a pint of wine daily, plus containers of olive oil, vinegar, and salt, delivered in three annual installments. In practice, the Franciscans often swapped their rations for church ornaments and construction materials, effectively adopting a Native American diet, complemented by European domesticates such as chicken and pig. Most of the kitchen garbage at Santa Catalina must have been discarded some distance away (probably outside the walled mission compound), but some accumulated in pits near the cocina, and occasional smaller pieces of garbage were trampled underfoot, being thus incorporated in the kitchen floor. When the kitchen was abandoned (shortly after the siege of 1680) several cooking containers and utensils were simply left behind. Dozens of deer bones littered the floor, perhaps the untidy leftovers from Santa Catalina’s last supper. A number of religious and secular regulations dictated exactly what Franciscan conventos were supposed to look like, and these restrictions are quite evident at Santa Catalina. Above all else, the friary was “cloistered,” a monastic enclosure to be kept separate and apart. Women were not permitted inside. Poverty, the hallmark of the Friars Minor, dictated that the friary consist of very small, sparsely furnished rooms, appropriately known as “cells.” Conventos usually followed a simple plan, often a single row of rooms, sometimes 46 @ c ha p t e r f i v e

defining the sides of a quadrangle which contained the sacred garden (the garth). Inside the convento were the refectory, the cells or suites of the friars, and perhaps some specialized rooms, such as a kitchen, offices, workshops, or granary. Meals were taken in silence inside a refectory. Water assumed great significance in Franciscan rite, and a source of fresh water was always a matter of concern when positioning a friary. Because of the importance of visitation by superiors and other friars, friaries were sometimes built to serve needs far beyond those of one or two lonely friars. We think that the convento at Santa Catalina closely followed such rules. The interior rooms are indeed small, apparently surrounding two central enclosures (one of which is probably the refectory). Immediately outside the back of the convento, we found nearly four dozen bronze bell fragments. Microscopic examination has revealed that several of the fragments are scarred with punch and axe marks, suggesting that the bells were deliberately destroyed. Several different bells are represented. The mission bell has always held a special significance, and inventories from the seventeenth century list hundreds of bells used in La Florida: little bells with stands, small bells suspended from necklaces, bells for ringing in the Mass, even signal bells for use by the military. The massive mission bell, suspended in front of all churches, came to symbolize the entire mission enterprise. Such bells punctuated everyday mission life, from calling the faithful for services to sounding the alarm in event of attack. And no festival was complete without the enthusiastic peals of all available bells ringing at once. So critical was the bell in everyday life that jurisdiction over exactly who was empowered to ring a given bell became a frequent point of friction between friar and soldier, pitting parish priest against civic official. Like all sacred vessels of the Church, bells were (and still are) consecrated or blessed. This ceremony is similar to baptism: use of exorcisms, application of water, salt, and holy oils, bestowing of a Christian name (usually that of a specific Saint), and the naming of godparents. The church bell was viewed literally as a member of the Hispanic Christian community, and this special status continued even when a bell was broken. Bell fragments were often collected at the Franciscan missions of California, to be sent to Mexico and ultimately to be recast into new bells. what did santa catalina lo ok like?

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The finds at Santa Catalina suggest an arresting, if speculative scenario: I suspect that the fragments found behind the seventeenth-century convento were from bells broken by rebellious Guale during the uprising of 1597. Eyewitness accounts describe how the artifacts of the church and belongings of the friars were torn apart, to be worn as heirlooms or simply broadcast about the mission ruins. Friars who returned to Santa Catalina some years later undoubtedly encountered these fragments, and I believe that the broken bells found behind the convento were a deliberate cache of still-consecrated fragments, perhaps to be later recycled into new bells. For the Guale, destruction of the mission bells symbolically destroyed the mission itself. By saving pieces of the ruined bells, the Franciscans were effectively recollecting and recasting Mission Santa Catalina. Both symbolic gestures are indicative of the strained relationships and divergent objectives which comprised the Spanish mission period in Georgia.

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Chapter Six

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New Light on Georgia’s Unwritten Past We have carefully excavated thousands of artifacts at Santa Catalina. Mostly, we find garbage, broken utilitarian items deliberately tossed out three centuries ago. Still, each potsherd, lump of burnt daub, and tiny corn cob has its story to tell. This unlovely accumulation of refuse is what we expected to find. But we also found more than just garbage. A few extremely rare finds allow us the unique opportunity of piecing together the details of life on the Georgia coast half a century before James Oglethorpe founded his Colony of Georgia.

The Poverty Paradox Life in Spanish Georgia was not easy. The priests and neophytes at Santa Catalina depended in large measure upon a subsidy from St. Augustine, capital city of La Florida and headquarters for the Franciscan mission system in Georgia. St. Augustine —“a struggling, military outpost on the fringe of empire with few of the amenities of civilization”— was considered hardship duty, where residents complained bitterly about the frontier conditions. In 1606, the visiting Bishop of Cuba encountered a modest wooden church so poor it lacked even a single candle. Fifteen years later, the same edifice was described as old and crumbling. The parish was so poor that in 1673, the sacristan-priest complained that Mass had to be cancelled for lack of hosts and wine. St. Augustine was perched on the frontier of the Spanish world, and the satellite mission outliers of Georgia defined the frontier’s frontier. Father Pareja described the utter privation of the friars laboring along the Guale coast; they

lacked not only food and clothing, but sometimes even vestments for conducting Mass. At one point, Fathers Pareja and Ruiz were reduced to fashioning a chalice from lead, complaining that funds designated for the missions were being siphoned off by officials in St. Augustine “since it seems to them that the soldiers are the necessary ones [here], and that we are of no use.” Isn’t it curious then, in light of such apparent poverty, that the ruins of Santa Catalina, presumably merely one of several destitute outposts, should contain such a rich inventory? While priests of St. Augustine lacked even the essentials of worship, the neophytes of Mission Santa Catalina were buried with a wealth of religious commodities— beads numbering in the thousands, metal and wooden crucifixes, glass cruets for the holy oils, religious medallions of bronze, silver, and even gold — a few made by craftsmen in Rome (maybe even in the Vatican itself ). Why and how did such a profusion of religious paraphernalia find its way into the hands of heathen converts, a people whose primary contact with the Spanish Empire was a handful of friars (who themselves had taken vows of abject poverty) and whose headquarters seemed to be so ill supplied? This apparent paradox can be resolved if we place the Franciscan missionary enterprise in Spanish Florida into its larger global context. Santa Catalina was established during the so-called “Age of Discovery,” an outpost of the badly battered Catholic Church of Spain. By this time, the Inquisition finally had diverted its energies from punishing Jews and Moors to marshaling doctrine and ideology against the threat of Protestantism. Spaniards planted the cross at Santa Catalina less than twenty years after the death of Martin Luther. Georgia loomed as a new field of spiritual conquest at the very time Catholicism sustained grave setbacks in Europe. Religion so thoroughly permeated everyday existence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain that all aspects of individual and collective life were, one way or another, touched by it. Catholicism became such a dominant force that literally twenty-five of every thousand Spaniards became religious zealots of one sort or another; monks living in monasteries, nuns residing in convents, lay clerics drawn from the population at large. Unlike their British competitors, the Spaniards colonizing Georgia made no pretense of separating Church from State. Catholicism had become a 50 @ c ha p t e r s i x

Sacred images recovered from cemetery at Santa Catalina. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

uniquely secular enterprise in the sixteenth century. Previous rights of lay patronage conceded by the Vatican were so broadly interpreted that the Church in the Spanish colonies was subordinate to the wishes of the crown, almost like an arm of the military. The cult of the Virgin Mary was deliberately spread throughout the Americas, a legacy that remains today. “From the Rio Grande to Patagonia . . . the same saints are honored on the same days and in essentially the same fashion, and the same Mass draws the faithful each Sunday.” The Catholic Church considered itself ultimately responsible for the religious well-being of all those living in La Florida. But specific ecclesiastical policy varied significantly between the town and the mission. Urban religious life was overseen by one or more secular or diocesan priests working within geographically fixed parishes. Although secular priests occasionally chose to spend time among the Indians, their primary responsibility was to care for the Spanish settlers. Missionary activities per se were conducted by regular or religious priests, each a member of a mendicant order, primarily Franciscan, Jesuit, or Dominican. Each primary mission (termed a doctrina) was served by a resident priest, who also visited one or more subsidiary mission stations (visitas), preferably on Sundays and holy days. The ultimate objective of missionization was to convince the Indians to lead good Christian lives, but in Georgia, as elsewhere on the Spanish frontier, this goal would hardly be achieved overnight. From San Francisco to St. Augustine, Spanish missionaries proceeded according to an explicit sequence of evolutionary steps. The conversion process began with a “pre-mission” (or entrada) phase, during which the missionary introduced himself and attempted to establish certain sacramental links to the Indians. Likely locations were scouted out for projected mission sites, and the friars assessed the linguistic/cultural areas involved. From the outset, the priests deliberately emphasized the symbolic trappings of Catholicism, ever conscious of the impression made by their distinctive garb, the sacred images, the ubiquitous crosses, the multi-hued paintings, and the religious statuary. Portable iconography and rosaries — especially prized because of the highly-valued beads — were selectively passed into Native 52 @ c ha p t e r s i x

American hands, following an overall strategy of converting the powerful caciques, who then could be called upon to help convert their followers. Individual missions were quickly established following the successful entrada. Friars assigned to specific missions set out to master the native language and commence instruction in the catechism. These catechetical lessons taught the neophytes the rudiments of Christian belief and devotional practice, emphasizing the common prayers used by the Church and frequent confession of sins. Instruction was reinforced by concrete expressions of faith. Always a hands-on enterprise, Catholicism was symbolized by processions of believers fingering rosaries and wearing medallions, bearing canopies, crosses, and icons. Most of the religious artifacts at Santa Catalina accumulated during this stage of missionization. But knowing about these standardized procedures, we were unprepared for the quantity and quality of religious iconography we found at Santa Catalina: the crucifixes, rosaries, religious seals, potsherds inscribed with crosses, religious medals, and medallions. This distinctive mission assemblage reflects a preoccupation with, and direct access to, the material expressions of faith—concrete reminders of religious truth and teaching, visual inducements to prayer and acts of virtue. The religious assemblage at Mission Santa Catalina reflects a worldview generated half a world away. Nowhere is the rigidity and formality of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish outlook better portrayed than in their attitude toward art. Art was zealous propaganda, reinforcing unification at home, and colonizing the world through religion. The Council of Trent (1563) established protocols that ruled Spanish art through the seventeenth century, fostering the singular homogeneity of Spanish Baroque art and repressing the liberalism of the Renaissance. Rather than seeking new modes of expression, conservative Spanish scholars and artists looked to the Church for guidance. Once accepted, specific iconographic styles were rapidly incorporated and repeated by artists wary of criticism and punishment. Arbiters of art, employed by the Inquisition, insured that artists focused on the correct depictions of religious subjects. In cities throughout Spain, painters’ guilds required formal examinations to new light on georgia,s unwritten past

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certify that aspiring masters possessed not only skill, but also knowledge of approved religious themes. Formal contracts were even drawn up to spell out matters of exact content, appropriate style, and precise accouterments. This superstructure of artistic and religious rigidity is evident in the stylized medals recovered at Santa Catalina. Several medallions commemorate special events in the history of the Church. Scenes range from St. Francis receiving the stigmata (symbolizing the five wounds on Jesus’s crucified body) to angels kneeling around a chalice, from St. Anthony of Padua to an IHS medal (an abbreviation of Iesus Hominum Salvator: “Jesus Savior of Mankind”), from Our Lady of Mt. Carmel to several renderings of the Blessed Virgin (characteristically standing above the half moon and surrounded by a gloria of light, a halo crown, and seven stars symbolic of her “joys”). Several medallions are ringed with the characteristic Franciscan cord, an important component of the habit worn, then as now, by Franciscan friars. Items of religious art were awarded to important neophytes at christenings, baptisms, and confirmations. These medallions are emblematic of an adage that permeated the mission philosophy: Abusus non tollat usum (“the abuse of the thing should be corrected, but it is not a reason for abolishing the proper use of that thing.”) Native Americans of Georgia had long worn shell gorgets to symbolize a wealth of sacred and secular beliefs. In fact, an adolescent was buried near the altar at Santa Catalina wearing a traditional rattlesnake gorget. The Franciscans had “baptized” this pagan custom in order to effect conversion. Wearing a Christian medallion was a logical extension of that practice. Guale Indians wearing religious medals not only possessed reminders of their faith, but also proclaimed that faith publicly. These exotic items comprised concrete demonstrations of Christian ideas and provided a visual reinforcement of repetitious acts of prayer, singing, and church-centered ritual. The religious artifacts of Santa Catalina are, in effect, object lessons reflecting the priorities of the seventeenth-century Georgian frontier. The Franciscan friars quite clearly earmarked a significant portion of their limited resources toward the trappings of religion, making available the symbolic paraphernalia proven effective in the conversion effort.

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A sampling of the religious medallions from the Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

The Fathers realized this practice bordered on idolatry, but they were wise enough to understand that an intermediate level was necessary in the transfer of religious veneration from demonolatrical objectives to monotheistic faith. Pictures and statues also identified a sacred area for the Indians who needed to understand Spanish insistence on the holiness of a church and its attendant buildings . . . it was an enticement or invitation, a kind of social seduction.

Such apparent contradictions are commonplace during an intermediate, preparochial stage of missionization. So long as the Indians accepted the most fundamental sacraments of the Church — especially baptism, monogamy, participation in the Mass, and Christian burial — allowances were made for the sake of conversion. Church belief viewed neophytes as people who had accepted the Faith, but were not “fully formed” in it. To the schooled Franciscan mind, this juxtaposition of Christian and pagan could be justified as a necessary step in the overall evolutionary process of conversion. The Guale were encouraged to bury their dead in Christian fashion, in unmarked graves beneath the floor of the church, hands crossed on the chest with feet toward the altar. But we know from excavations on St. Catherines Island and elsewhere that the Indians of coastal Georgia were accustomed to placing valued objects in the graves of the departed; for millennia they believed that “you really can take it with you.” To achieve an important outward symbol of conversion — and to stamp out offensive pagan burial mounds and charnel houses — friars “allowed” the Guale to continue their tradition of grave goods, even though it directly violated Church practice. Not “fully formed” in Christianity, the Guale enjoyed the luxury of seeking salvation through conversion while simultaneously retaining selected traditional customs. This is why so much religious material ended up in the graveyard at Mission Santa Catalina. The friars’ perception of neophytes as “not fully formed in Christianity” coupled with an emphasis on religious artifacts as symbols of conversion account for many of the “surprises” we found at Santa Catalina. This belief system also explains why these same artifacts should be so 56 @ c ha p t e r s i x

conspicuously absent at St. Augustine, the hub from which the dozens of missions throughout Georgia and Florida were supplied. The mission, as a frontier institution, was theoretically designed to be only temporary. Based on previous experience in Central and South America, Spanish missionaries were told to effect complete conversion within a decade, turn the neophytes over to secular clergy, and then move on to new frontiers. At this point, the faithful would have been elevated to the status of “fully formed Christians and full-fledged members of the Church.” Neophyte communities were to graduate from simplified doctrinal instruction into mainstream Hispanic society. Mission methodology, accordingly, should eventually merge imperceptibly with traditional pastoral practice and technique. Whereas Church furnishings and items of personal devotion remained important under secular guidance, the clergy no longer felt the need to distribute the quantity (or quality) of Church-related artifacts so critical during a pre-parochial, “mission” phase of outreach. In strictly “mission” times, the Franciscan effort was heavily subsidized from public coffers — rationalized by the Crown as a means of pacifying natives without the use of force. But support for the secular churches of La Florida relied heavily upon Crown-controlled personal tithes, and this agriculturally based tribute fluctuated dramatically in St. Augustine. During the famine year of 1697, for instance, the Bishop commented that “in times of hunger all men quarreled, and all had reason.” Whereas the earlier Franciscan missions enjoyed an inflated symbolic status, the parish churches of St. Augustine directly reflected the relative status of that community within the Spanish empire at large. This is why so many religious objets d’art show up at Santa Catalina, while they almost never occur at the contemporaneous urban centers of La Florida. This impression is reinforced by the manifests of supplies assembled by Menéndez de Avilés for his conquest of Spanish Florida. Although the adelantado contributed some church bells and altar furnishings to his new settlement, this meager inventory pales in comparison to the massive supplies of artillery, ammunition, marine supplies, foodstuffs, bulk iron, agricultural tools, and basic office supplies. new light on georgia,s unwritten past

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The occasional crucifix or rosary bead turns up in archaeological excavations at St. Augustine and her sister city, Santa Elena (South Carolina), but the artifacts of religion are swamped by artifacts from the military, domestic, and bureaucratic sectors. Although an absolutely indispensable component of the Hispanic lifestyle, religious items constituted a tiny fraction of the baggage necessary to transfer Castilian civilization to the Georgia coast. With the rights of full citizenship in the Spanish Empire and the Catholic Church came restrictions and responsibilities. Not only would the “fully Christian” Indian be subject to taxation, but, at least in theory, he or she would also be required to live up to the full measure of Church membership. Unlike the accommodating friars of the previous “mission” phase, who made exceptions for the neophyte, the parish priest expected full compliance with the regulations of the Church. Indians achieving this ultimate “parochial” stage of conversion were, at least in the eyes of the Church, to be elevated to the level of Spaniards and creoles living in towns such as St. Augustine. The operative assumption in both cases was that the faithful were “fully formed Christians and full fledged members of the Church.” The citizenry was expected to participate fully in the belief system and ritual prescribed by the Church and administered by the diocesan priest. It is not surprising that the graves at Soledad, a cemetery intended exclusively for the use of parishioners in St. Augustine, contained almost exclusively simple shroud burials. The rich grave goods of Santa Catalina were not permitted here.

The Preferred Hispanic Design for New World Living Georgians are justly proud of planned colonial cities. Struck by the decadence in places like Charles Town, the prescient James Oglethorpe carefully laid out Savannah in 1733 to create a different urban reality. Each of Savannah’s four original downtown squares was surrounded by regularized town lots, and several of the largest were reserved for public use. By design, these squares were to function as the center of the neighborhood’s social, economic, and religious life. In the years following, Oglethorpe hand-picked the town site 58 @ c ha p t e r s i x

for Frederica, along the inland passage of St. Simons Island. Home for nearly a thousand settlers, Frederica’s regularly laid out streets were fringed with orange trees. When Oglethorpe sailed for England in 1743, never again to return to Georgia, he had firmly established new standards of town planning in colonial America. But Oglethorpe was not the first European to plan the settlements of Georgia. The settlement at Santa Catalina was but one small portion of the global Spanish community. It has been said that since the fall of the Roman Empire no world power has been faced with so great a need to conquer, populate, and hold a vast new territory under its dominion until Spain’s so-called discovery of America: “To conquer and to found — twin tasks of [Spanish] captains-general and their lieutenants. The first is an act of force. But to found occurs only when the plans for a new town are drawn up, a new church is built, a new town council is installed. This is true even though the church may be a shack, and the council a symbol; the entire city no more than a hamlet.” This first European intrusion into Georgia was a heavily regimented endeavor, conditioned by social and economic policy ingrained in the fabric of Spanish consciousness. In effect, Spain attempted to regiment everything from economy to religion, from art to architecture. Archaeologist Kathleen Deagan has contrasted the “conservative” bent of Spanish colonial life in St. Augustine with the rather free-form entrepreneurial evolution realized in the Anglo-American cultures of New England. Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Spain issued thousands of regulations promoting, regularizing, and controlling life in the American colonies. One document in particular, “The Royal Ordinances Concerning the Laying Out of Towns” issued in 1573 by Phillip II, stands out because it prescribed an idealized system for promoting colonization and laying out civil settlements throughout sixteenth-century Spanish America. These Royal Ordinances were a comprehensive compilation of 148 regulations dictating the practical aspects of New World site selection, city planning, and political organization, effectively removing these tasks from the Spanish military. New Hispanic towns were to be established only where vacant lands existed, or where Indians had consented freely to their establishment. Urban centers were supposed to be located on an elevated site, surrounded by abunnew light on georgia,s unwritten past

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dant arable land for farming and pasturage. The ideal town site was also within easy reach of fresh water, fuel, timber, and native peoples (presumably for labor purposes). Sufficient space was to be left in the original town site to allow for growth. The Ordinances stipulated that, before any construction began, a detailed town plan be drafted, showing exact locations of major buildings, lots, streets, and plaza. The plazas were to be laid out first, the rest of the town oriented accordingly. The principal plaza was to be located near the landing place in coastal towns, in the center of the community for inland settlements. The plaza was always rectangular in form, and its prescribed length was one and one-half times its width, a design thought to provide most efficient traffic movement and ample room for holding fiestas. Designed for an entire continent, the Royal Ordinances defined ideal spatial arrangements that, in reality, were often modified to suit local environmental conditions. Frontier variability frequently fostered compromise, and no single settlement anywhere in the New World followed all these laws. Historic archaeologists can now assess the degree of compliance between this idealized European blueprint and on-the-ground American reality. In St. Augustine, for instance, the sixteenth-century town plan was clearly laid out according to a standardized grid, with the size of town lots corresponding almost precisely to those stipulated by the Ordinances. But this preferred Hispanic plan, a direct attempt to transplant a “civilized” way of life upon America’s wilderness, remained highly “frontier” in character. The founders of St. Augustine chose not to construct a central plaza — hallmark of Spanish urban planning and a mainstay of the Ordinances. Philip II’s rigid urban plan would have usurped the highest, residentially most desirable land for a central plaza. The public buildings of St. Augustine, including the earliest church, were grouped at the northern end of the town, rather than in the center as dictated by the ordinances. Recognizing the ecological realities in low-lying St. Augustine, the early urban planners positioned the grid in response to local drainage patterns and topography. We knew almost nothing about the physical layout of Spanish missions in Georgia before we found Santa Catalina. Our only clue came from a rare map surviving from the period. This plan view, dated 1691, depicts the forti.

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fied mission compound of Santa Maria, built on Amelia Island in northern Florida. This mission was apparently built by refugees who had fled St. Catherines in the 1680s. The inscription on the Santa María map reads as follows: Stockade made on the Island of Santa Maria and place of Santa Catalina in the Province of Guale; it is 3 varas in height with loopholes for the firing of arms cut into its little bulwarks terraplained to half the height with its moat; inside is the church (iglesia), the convento of the priest, the barracks of the infantry, and a little house for cooking (cocina) as it appears in the plan with its scale in varas.

This map is scaled in Spanish yards (varas), thought to be about 84 centimeters (32.9 inches) in St. Augustine. If we assume that mission outliers of St. Augustine used the same units of measurement, the Santa María map suggests some expectations for the archaeological record on St. Catherines Island and elsewhere in Spanish Florida. The mission on Amelia Island may have been, to some degree, planned as a “replica” of the mission on St. Catherines Island. Although we do not know whether the projected mission compound at Santa María was ever executed, the map does provide a model of what such a settlement should have looked like. The site of Mission Santa María was discovered on Amelia Island, Florida. Dr. Gerald Milanich, then of Florida Museum of Natural History, Gainesville, supervised these extremely important excavations. The actual settlement plan at Santa Catalina, as reconstructed archaeologically, rather closely corresponds to expectations from the Santa Maria map. We now know that the entire mission complex and surrounding Guale village at Santa Catalina followed a rigid grid, the long axis of the church oriented 45° west of magnetic north. The church defined the western margin of the cental plaza; the cocina and convento complex demarcated the eastern margin. The central plaza at Santa Catalina is rectangular, measuring 23 meters wide by approximately 40 meters (the northwest-southeast dimensions are not well-defined at present), and is considerably larger than that depicted on the Santa Maria map (15 meters × 17 meters). new light on georgia,s unwritten past

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Plan view (1691) of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, located on the Island of Santa Maria. (Archivo General de Indias, 54-5-13/27, Stetson Collection, P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History, University of Florida, Gainesville.)

Metric abstraction of the Santa Maria Mission map. (Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

Our excavations on St. Catherines Island also demonstrate the degree to which Philip II’s Ordinances were used to plan Georgia’s first known European settlement. Public buildings were laid out along a rigid grid pattern, as stipulated by Ordinance 110. At Santa Catalina, a rectangular plaza defined the center of the complex (Ordinance 112), flanked on one side by the mission church (Ordinance 124: “separated from any nearby building . . . and ought to be seen from all sides”), on the other by the friary (Ordinances 118, 119, 121). The plaza was surrounded by (and separated from) the Guale pueblo; “in the plaza, no lots shall be assigned to private individuals; instead they shall be used [only] for the building of the church and royal houses” (Ordinance 126). Housing in the pueblo consisted of rectangular buildings, perhaps separated by “streets.” Native American structures were apparently built as an extension of this initial gridwork. At Santa Catalina, we still lack an analog to the “garrison” shown at the new light on georgia,s unwritten past

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Low-level aerial photograph showing excavations at Santa Catalina de Guale, as of May 1984. The top of the photograph is north, and white tic marks are spaced at 20-meter intervals. The light-colored vertical strips are 4-meter-wide shallow test trenches. Individual mission buildings are clearly evident at the center of the clearing. (Photograph by Dennis O’Brien, courtesy of American Museum of Natural History and St. Catherines Island Archaeological Project.)

top of the Santa Maria map. Perhaps the remains of this building remain undiscovered. But it may also be that a specific facility for housing infantry was never built at Santa Catalina, having been added only to later missions in response to British attacks after 1680. The Franciscan missions of Georgia, as elsewhere in the New World, clearly followed long-established rules and time-honored sequences of construction. These matters were not subject to priestly whim. Considerable paperwork was involved to insure compliance, and high-level visitations were sufficiently frequent to insure a degree of conformity. Native Americans at these missions lived a regimented life, and the Hispanic architecture of these settlements 64 @ c ha p t e r s i x

reflects what Kathleen Deagan calls the “rigid organization of space by a formal sixteenth century Iberian template.” Paradoxically, the plaza and grid arrangement — hallmark of Hispanic urban planning in the New World — is virtually nonexistent in homeland Spain, where town planning was rather formless. This ideal plan was deliberately abstracted from a few selected cases, which were then projected into mainstream urban planning in the New World. City planning in Spanish America, therefore, was not the diffusion of a material trait, but the utilization of an idea in a new context, with specific goals in mind. The process of the founding and growth of cities, towns, and villages in America illustrates particularly well the ‘formal’ side of conquest culture in which careful planning and direction rather than the customs and forms familiar to conquistadors and administrators were instrumental in developing new patterns.

The spatial organization of mission life in Spanish Florida exemplifies what anthropologist George Foster has termed a deliberate simplification or “stripping down” of homeland Spanish culture. That the grid-plan characterizes only a half-dozen pre-Conquest Spanish towns is irrelevant. The Ordinances reflect an idealized Spanish template, upon which New World forms were modeled. The great variety in Spanish towns and cities was deliberately replaced throughout Spanish America by variations upon one single theme. The success of Oglethorpe’s eighteenth-century efforts in urban design has overshadowed significant earlier developments. The truth is that the Spanish began serious civic planning in colonial Georgia more than a century before Oglethorpe set foot on Yamacraw Bluff. The rudiments of Georgia’s first urban plan can still be seen in the archaeological ruins of Mission Santa Catalina.

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Timeline of Significant Historical Events, St. Catherines Island, Georgia

j @j@j@ 40,000 – 25,000 years ago

St. Catherines Island formed as dune ridge along beach of former shorelines. At this time, the Georgia coast was 70 to 80 miles eastward of present location.

18,000 – 5000 years ago

Pleistocene (Ice Age) glaciers melt, sea levels rise, and Georgia coastline moves westward. Leeward side of St. Catherines Island dunes is flooded, forming a lagoon (and ultimately a salt marsh). Dunes are stabilized by beach grasses and other shoreline vegetation.

Prior to 2500 b.c.

The first human arrives on St. Catherines Island.

2200 b.c.

People on St. Catherines Island begin making fiber-tempered pottery.

1100 b.c.

Burial mounds are erected on St. Catherines Island.

a.d. 1100 (maybe earlier) a.d. 1492

Maize (corn) agriculture introduced to St. Catherines Island. Christopher Columbus lands in New World.

1526

Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón establishes Spanish colony with 500 men and women, including African slaves and Dominican friars. Colony fails and is deserted within a year. Location of settlement unknown, but probably somewhere along Georgia coast.

1540

De Soto expedition crosses Georgia.

1565

Pedro de Menéndez establishes large Spanish colony at St. Augustine (Florida) as joint venture with King of Spain.

1566

Menéndez visits town of Guale (probably on St. Catherines Island), accompanied by Jesuit missionaries. Spain’s second town, Santa Elena (Parris Island, South Carolina), established soon thereafter.

1573

First Franciscans stationed in Georgia and Florida.

1576

Guale Indian rebellion, setting off years of warfare along Georgia coast; there is a Mission Santa Catalina by this time (somewhere along the Georgia coast).

1586

Pirate Francis Drake attacks Georgia coast and burns St. Augustine.

1587

Garrison of Santa Elena abandoned; Mission Santa Catalina de Guale is now the northern Spanish outpost on Georgia coast.

1597

Guale Indian rebellion begins on mainland. Two Franciscan friars killed at Santa Catalina and mission burned.

1602

Governor Mendéz de Canzo of St. Augustine arrives at St. Catherines Island on a peace-making visit.

1604

New Governor, Pedro de Ibarra, visits St. Catherines Island, exhorts the Guale to practice Christianity, but brings no missionaries.

1605

Bishop of Cuba (and Georgia) Juan de Las Cabezas de Altamirano baptizes Guale caciques on St. Catherines Island and reestablishes Mission Santa Catalina de Guale — beginning the so-called “Golden Age” of Franciscan missions on the Georgia coast.

1606

Bishop Altamirano confirms 286 Christians at Santa Catalina.

1607

British establish Jamestown (Virginia).

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1645

Guale Indians in insurrection. They move to mainland to live with relatives, but are persuaded back to mission.

1670

English establish Charles Town, South Carolina.

1673

Spanish garrison established on St. Catherines Island.

1674

Fugitive indentured servants from Charles Town take refuge at Santa Catalina.

1680

English forces from Charles Town lay siege to Santa Catalina. British forces repulsed, but Santa Catalina abandoned soon thereafter.

1683

Pirates attack Georgia coast and besiege St. Augustine.

1684

Pirates attack Georgia Coast again.

1687

British Captain Dunlop visits St. Catherines Island and describes abandoned Spanish ruins.

1702 – 1704

James Moore, Governor of South Carolina, burns Florida missions and destroys St. Augustine.

1733

Governor James Oglethorpe establishes the Colony of Georgia.

1748

Mary Musgrove moves to St. Catherines Island.

1763

Spanish abandon St. Augustine. Florida ceded to England in exchange for Havana.

1765

Button Gwinnett purchases St. Catherines Island.

1776

Gwinnett signs Declaration of Independence.

1777

Gwinnett dies from wounds suffered in duel with Lachlan McIntosh.

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Discussion Questions j @j@j@ 1. Did the video documentary make you want to visit Georgia’s coastal islands? 2. If you have ever been on any of the islands, did you have a chance to learn anything about the history of the area before you visited or while you were there? If so, are the accounts of the historical development of these islands similar to what you learned about St. Catherine’s from the documentary? 3. If you had a chance to get involved in the study of the Spanish mission on this island, what kind of research would you like to do? What kind of questions would you like to try to answer? 4. Do you think these types of archaeological studies are worth the expense? 5. Do you think the uncovering and studying of human remains is justified by what is learned? 6. Are you satisfied with the archaeologist’s interpretations of the findings? 7. Did you learn anything new about the technology archaeologists use to do their work today? 8. The report of findings in this production challenges earlier accounts of this period. Does this cause you to wonder about accounts of other episodes in our past? 9. Do you think Georgia remains “the debatable land” in any sense? 10. Do you accept the archaeologist-anthropologist’s (David Thomas’s) position that we must be concerned about continuing to preserve St. Catherines Island? If so, is it realistic to think it can be kept pristine when there is so much interest in commercial development of this and other coastal islands? 11. The Guale Indian pueblo at Santa Catalina has not yet been excavated. If you were making the decision, would you excavate the pueblo site? What question would you hope the study of this site might answer?

12. Do any particular images from the video stick in your mind? Why do you think these images are most lasting? 13. Do you think the documentary does a good job of explaining the value of what we can learn about the past for our present times and for our future? 14. Do you think enough time was spent on each of the key perspectives of the documentary — the existing knowledge of the island’s history, the contemporary archaeological project, and the issue of ecological preservation? Or would you have spent more or less time on any of these issues if you were the producer? These discussion questions were prepared by Dr. Margaret Holt of the Department of Adult Education, University of Georgia.

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Endnotes j @j@j@ Preface 2011 1. All words printed in boldface have been defined in the glossary.

Preface 1988 1. Dunlop, Captain, “Journall Capt. Dunlop’s voyage to the southward, 1687,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, vol. 30 (1929), p. 131.

Chapter Two 1. Thwaites, Ruben Gold, The Colonies: 1492 – 1750 (New York, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892). 2. Floyd, Marmaduke, “Certain Tabby Ruins on the Georgia Coast,” in Coulter, E. Merton, ed., Georgia’s Disputed Ruins (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1937), p. 4. 3. For a discussion of Mary Ross see Mendelson, Johanna, comp., Mary Letitia Ross Papers: A Descriptive Inventory, Paul Ellingson, ed. (Atlanta, Georgia Department of History, 1979).

Chapter Three 1. Habig, Marion A., The Alamo Chain of Missions: A History of San Antonio’s Five Old Missions, rev. ed. (Chicago, Franciscan Herald Press, 1976), p. 18. 2. Gannon, Michael V., The Cross in the Sand: The Early Catholic Church in Florida, 1513 – 1870, (Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1965), p. 41. 3. Geiger, Maynard J., The Franciscan Conquest of Florida (1573 – 1618) (Washington, D.C., Catholic University of America, 1937), pp. 88 – 89. 4. Bolton, Herbert E. and Mary Ross, The Debatable Land (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1925), p. 35.

Chapter Six 1. Foster, George M., Culture and Conquest: America’s Spanish Heritage (Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, no. 27, 1960), pp. 4 – 5. 2. For a more complete discussion of “methodology of missionization,” see Spicer, Edward H., Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United

States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533 – 1960 (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1962), pp. 288 – 97 and Polzer, Charles W., Rules and Precepts of the Jesuit Missions of Northwestern New Spain (Tucson, University of Arizona Press, 1976), pp. 39 – 58. 3. Ewing, J. Franklin, “Appendix, The Religious Medals,” in Ross Gordon Montgomery, Watson Smith, and John Otis Brew, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, vol. 36 (1949), p. 103. 4. Polzer, pp. 48 – 49. 5. Zendegui, Guillermo de, “City Planning in the Spanish Colonies,” Americas, Supplement, vol. 29, no. 2 (1977), p. S-l. 6. For a discussion of town planning in St. Augustine, see Deagan, Kathleen, “St. Augustine: First Urban Enclave in the United States,” North American Archaeologist, vol. 3, no. 3 (1982), pp. 189 – 9l. 7. Deagan, Kathleen, “Spanish-Indian Interaction in Sixteenth-century Florida and Hispaniola,” in William W. Fitzhugh, ed., Cultures in Contact (Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution, 1985), p. 29. 8. Foster, p. 49.

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Glossary j @j@j@ Words throughout the text rendered in boldface are defined below. adelantado (Span.) The governor of a frontier province; the leader of a sea expedition empowered to govern the lands he may discover and conquer. adobe Sun-dried bricks commonly used in the architecture of the American Southwest. anomaly A term used in remote sensing to refer to a deviation of an observed value, as for instance the departure from the regular magnetic orientation caused by subsurface fired daub deposits. Apalachee Muskhogean-speaking native Americans who once lived in western Florida; an important chain of missions extending from St. Augustine and centered at the modern city of Tallahassee. Apalachicola Important river and bay in extreme western Florida; also the name of the westernmost mission chain extending from St. Augustine. atrio (Span.) Courtyard; often used to denote a churchyard. beatification The process in the Roman Catholic church for determining the sanctity of a person who has died and declaring him among the blessed in heaven; usually but not necessarily followed by canonization and sainthood. Black Legend The anti-Spanish and biased approach to the Spanish colonizers perpetuated in textbooks, histories, etc. The Spaniards are presented as cruel, amoral, and lazy in contrast to the thrifty, moral and industrious English colonists. cacique (Span.) Indian political leader or chieftain. campo santo (Span.) Cemetery. catechism A collection or handbook of questions and answers for teaching the principles of a religion. chancel The part of the church nearest the altar, reserved for the use of clergy, sometimes set off by a railing or screen. cocina (Span.) Kitchen.

consolidant A substance (such as polyvinyl acetate) used to harden and/or stabilize archaeological finds such as bones when they are found in a decomposed or fragile state. convento (Span.) A monastery, convent, or cloister that houses the members of a religious order. creole A person of European parentage born in the West Indies, Gulf States, or Central America; also a descendant of such persons. Culapala Creek An Indian name used in this volume to disguise the actual location of Santa Catalina de Guale in order to protect remaining archaeological deposits. daub The processed sand, clay, and organic mixture used in building the mission structures; see wattle-and-daub. daub pit A hole in the ground where clay was processed into daub by the addition of plant fibers and sand, prior to being used in wattle-and-daub structures. diocesan priest A priest who works within a fixed parish; also secular priest. doctrina (Span.) An Indian community converted to Christianity but lacking a parish; the main mission. dripline The more or less linear pattern formed on the ground by rain falling from the edge of a roof overhang. entrada (Span.) A term used to refer to the early stage of Spanish entry into new territory. Eucharist The consecrated bread and wine used in Holy Communion. La Florida The name the Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon gave to the land he discovered in the Easter season (Pascua Florida = Feast of Flowers) of 1513. The Spanish used it to refer to all the land they laid claim to on the eastern coast of present-day U.S.A. Franciscan The religious order founded by St. Francis of Assisi in 1209, now divided into 3 branches; also any member thereof. friar A member of any of the mendicant orders, among them the Franciscan order. garth Sacred garden in a monastery.

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gloria A halo or aureole and its representation in art. gorget An ornament worn about the neck, drilled with two holes. ground-penetrating radar A remote sensing device which transmits a radar pulse into the soil. When a discontinuity is encountered, an echo returns to the radar receiving unit. Guale (pronounced “Walley”) Muskhogean-speaking Native Americans of the Georgia Coast; term also used to denote both the local leader (see also mico) and the village in which that leader resides. Harris line A growth arrest discontinuity in human bone which usually indicates an episode of stress, caused either by malnutrition or disease. host The consecrated bread or wafer of the Eucharist. hypoplasia Arrested episode of development in any part of the body; used here to describe the arrested growth in tooth enamel; similar to Harris lines in long bones. iglesia (Span.) Church. in situ (Latin: in place) Phrase used by archaeologists to indicate that artifacts are in the same position and location as when first found. Jesuit A member of the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic order founded by Saint Ignatius Loyola in 1534. macana A wooden weapon used by Indians of South America and the Antilles, usually made like a flattened club or sword and sometimes edged or headed with stone. magnetometer An instrument used to measure the strength of magnetism between the earth’s magnetic core and the sensor, used in remote sensing; see proton precession magnetometer. majolica A distinctive kind of colorful, decorated earthenware that is tin-enameled and glazed. Usually of Italian, Spanish, or Mexican origin. mendicant order A religious order whose members depended on alms and were held to vows of poverty, e.g. the Franciscan order. mico (Muskhogean = miko) a Muskhogean term for chief. midden Refuse deposits resulting from human activities, generally consisting of soil, food remains such as animal bone and shell, and discarded artifacts.

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Muskhogean The most important Native American language family in the American Southeast. Once spoken in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and adjacent areas. Includes five closely related groups of languages: ChoctawChickasaw, Apalachee, Alabama-Koasati, Mikasuki-Hitchiti, and MuskogeeSeminole. nave The central part of a church. neophyte A recent convert to Christianity. olive jar A kind of pottery vessel used for the shipment of olives or olive oil as well as wine from southern Spain. The jar had mouth and bottom smaller than the middle. Such jars are commonly found in Colonial Spanish archaeological sites and serve as time markers. overburden Sterile stratum overlying an archaeological stratum bearing traces of the culture being studied. parish church The church in a diocese under the charge of a secular or parish priest. potsherd A fragment of pottery found in an archaeological excavation; also sherd. presidio The garrison or fortress of a Spanish town. proton precession magnetometer A device used in remote sensing. Its sensor is filled with hydrocarbon-charged fluid. Protons in the fluid can be temporarily aligned (polarized) by a magnetic field generated from a wire coil inside the sensor. When this current is removed, the spin of the protons causes them to “precess” in the direction of the earth’s magnetic field. The magnetometer then converts the frequency emitted by the spinning protons to a measurement of the earth’s magnetic intensity at that spot. Once plotted by a computer, any variations in intensity will show up as anomalies. pueblo The town or village associated with a Spanish mission in which the Indian converts lived. Also communal villages of the Southwest United States, consisting of one or more flat-roofed structures of stone or adobe housing several families; when used as a proper noun, Pueblo refers to the Indians who inhabited these pueblos, e.g., Hopi, Zuni. refectory The dining hall in a monastery or convent. regular priest A priest belonging to a monastic community or religious order. religious When used as a noun, this term refers to a member of a community of monks or nuns. 78 @ glossary

remote sensing In its strictest sense limited to photogrammetry, but in current archaeological usage it refers to the non-destructive techniques employed in geophysical prospection and the generation of archaeological data without destroying the record by excavating: e.g., infrared aerial sensing, magnetometry, soil resistivity, ground-penetrating radar, and differential heat analysis. reredo (Span.) Decorative metal panels often placed behind the altar or hung on sanctuary walls. sacristy A room in a church, usually adjoining the sanctuary, where the sacred vessels, vestments, etc., are kept. sanctuary The particularly holy place in a church at the altar. secular priest A priest living in the outside world, not bound by a monastic vow or rule. secularization The nationalization of church resources by government; the Spanish missions of California were secularized by the Mexican government in 1833. sherd See potsherd signature A term used in archaeology which refers to a characteristic signal, picture, pattern, or readout given by a particular subsurface feature during a remote sensing procedure. soil resistivity A remote sensing technique which monitors the degree of electrical resistance in soils—which often depends on the amount of moisture present—in a restricted volume near the surface. Buried features are usually detected by the differential retention of ground water. stigmata Marks resembling the crucifixion wounds of Jesus. tabby A cement made of lime, sand or gravel, and oyster shells poured into forms and used to construct plantation buildings along the coast of Georgia and South Carolina in the 17th and 18th centuries. For a while, the tabby ruins were mistaken for mission buildings in Georgia. Timucua Native American group that lived in most of the northern third of peninsular Florida, extending into southeastern Georgia to about Brunswick. At present, there is no documentary evidence confirming the linguistic affiliation of Timucuans. transept That part of a church built out at right angles to the nave. vara (Span.) A linear measurement equivalent to about 84 cm or 32.9 inches in St. Augustine, Florida. glossary

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visita (Span.) An outpost of the mission, also the inspection visit by a superior of the church or the religious order. visitation An official visit of inspection or examination made by a religious superior to the mission and its outposts; see also visita. wattle Woven wooden framework used in wall construction. Freshly cut timbers are set vertically and then reinforced with marsh cane woven horizontally between the uprights. wattle-and-daub A building technique using wattlework that has been plastered or daubed with a mixture of marsh mud, sand, and plant fibers (on St. Catherines Island probably grass and Spanish moss). wattlework See wattle Yuchi Native American group that lived in various places throughout the American Southeast; they considered themselves to be the “original inhabitants” of the Southeast. Language probably distantly related to Siouan.

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Suggestions for Further Reading

j @j@j@ Deagan, Kathleen 1983. Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. New York, Academic Press. This book provides a useful summary of the archaeology at St. Augustine, America’s oldest city. Mission Santa Catalina was an outpost of St. Augustine, and the archaeology conducted there (by Dr. Deagan and her colleagues) provides a first-rate baseline for our research on St. Catherines Island. 1987. Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500 – 1800. Vol. 1: Ceramics, Glassware, and Beads. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution. 2002. Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean, 1500 – 1800. Vol. 2: Portable Personal Possessions. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press. These two volumes provide a detailed analysis of Spanish material culture. Well-illustrated and a must for those interested in the details of Spanish period archaeology in Georgia. Gannon, Michael V. 1965. The Cross in the Sand: The Early Catholic Church in Florida, 1513 – 1870. Gainesville, University of Florida Press. (reprinted 1967). Written for a general audience, this impassioned account provides an insider’s view of the early Christian experience in the American Southeast. Hudson, Charles 1976. The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press. This is the best available reference dealing with the Indians of Georgia. The coverage is comprehensive and the style is highly readable. Lyon, Eugene 1976. The Enterprise of Florida: Pedro Menendez de Aviles and the Spanish Conquest of 1565 – 1568. Gainesville, The University Presses of Florida. Written by the premier historian of the period, this superb account describes the political climate surrounding the founding of Spanish Florida.

Thomas, David Hurst 1987. The Archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: 1. Search and Discovery. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 63, pt. 2, pp. 47 – 161. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/251. Although addressed in part to the professional archaeologist, this volume was also written with the general reader in mind. It remains the most complete source addressing the archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. All American Museum of Natural History publications can presently be downloaded at the links provided. Waterbury, Jean Parker (editor) 1983. The Oldest City: St. Augustine, Saga of Survival. St. Augustine, St. Augustine Historical Society. This volume is a series of essays by outstanding archaeologists and historians who attempt to bring the current state of knowledge to an interested public. The following works, grouped by subject, may be consulted by those who would like to pursue further research.

the archaeology of st. catherines island, georgia Blair, Elliot H., Lorann S.A. Pendleton, and Peter Francis 2009. The Beads of St. Catherines Island. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 89, pp. i – xi, 1 – 300. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/5956. Larsen, Clark Spencer 1982. The Anthropology of St. Catherines Island: 3. Prehistoric Human adaptation. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 57, pt. 3, pp. 155 – 270. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/306. 1990. The Archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: 2. Biocultural Interpretations of a Population in Transition. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 68. http://hdl.handle. net/2246/252. 2001. Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida. In C. S. Larsen (editor), Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism, pp. 22 – 51. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. 2002. Bioarchaeology of the Late Prehistoric Guale: South End Mound I, St. Catherines Island. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 84. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/310. 82 @ suggestions for further reading

Larsen, Clark Spencer and David Hurst Thomas 1982. The Anthropology of St. Catherines Island: 4. The St. Catherines Period Mortuary Complex. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History vol. 57, pt. 4: 271 – 342. http://hdl.handle .net/2246/307. 1986. The Anthropology of St. Catherines Island: 5. The South End Mound Complex. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 63, pt. 1: 1 – 46. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/309. Moore, Clarence B. 1897. Certain Aboriginal Mounds of the Georgia Coast. Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, vol. 11, 2nd series, pt. 1, pp. 2 – 138. Reitz, Elizabeth J., Barnet Pavao-Zuckerman, Daniel C. Weinand, and Gwyneth A. Duncan 2010. Mission and Pueblo Santa Catalina de Guale, St. Catherines Island, Georgia (U.S.A.): A Comparative Zooarchaeological Analysis. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, in press. Saunders, Rebecca. 2000. Stability and Change in Guale Indian Pottery A.D. 1300 – 1702. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press. Thomas, David Hurst 1987. The Archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: 1. Search and Discovery. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 63, pt. 2, pp. 47 – 161. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/251. 1988. Saints and Soldiers at Santa Catalina: Hispanic Designs for Colonial America. In M. Leone and M. P. Potter (editors), The Recovery of Meaning: Historical Archaeology in the Eastern United States, pp. 73 – 140. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press. 1993. The Archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: Our First Fifteen Years. In B. G. McEwan (editor), The Spanish Missions of La Florida, pp. 1 – 34. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. Thomas, David Hurst, Grant Jones, Roger Durham, and Clark Spencer Larsen 1978. The Anthropology of St. Catherines Island: 1. The Natural and Cultural History. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 55, pt. 2. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/304. suggestions for further reading

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Thomas, David Hurst and Clark Spencer Larsen 1979. The Anthropology of St. Catherines Island: 2. The RefugeDeptford Mortuary Complex. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 56, pt. 1. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/305.

native americans on the georgia coast Anderson, D. G. 1994. The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press. Anderson, David G. and Robert C. Mainfort, Jr. (editors) 2002. The Woodland Southeast. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press. Fogelson, Raymond D. (editor) 2004. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 14: Southeast, pp. 87 – 100. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press. Hudson, Charles 1976. The Southeastern Indians. Knoxville, University of Tennessee Press. Larsen, Clark Spencer (editor) 2001. Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. Larson, Lewis H., Jr. 1978. Historic Guale Indians of the Georgia Coast and the Impact of the Spanish Mission Effort. In Milanich, Jerald, and S. Proctor, Tacachale: Essays on the Indians of Florida and Southeastern Georgia during the Historic Period. Gainesville, University Presses of Florida, pp. 120 – 40. 1980. Aboriginal Subsistence Technology on the Southeastern Coastal Plain during the Late Prehistoric Period. Gainesville, University Presses of Florida. Sassaman, Kenneth and David Anderson (editors) 1996. Archaeology of the Mid-Holocene Southeast. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. Smith, Hale G. 1956. The European and the Indian: European-Indian Contacts in Georgia and Florida. Florida Anthropological Society, Publication no. 4. 84 @ suggestions for further reading

Swanton, John R. 1922. Early History of the Creek Indians and Their Neighbors. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 73. 1946. The Indians of the Southeastern United States. Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 137. Thomas, David Hurst 1993. Historic Indian Period Archaeology of the Georgia Coastal Zone. University of Georgia, Laboratory of Archaeology Series, Report no. 31. 2008. The Native American Landscapes of St. Catherines Island, Georgia. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 88, 3 vols. (i – xiii, 1 – 1136). http://hdl.handle.net/2246/5955. Thomas, David Hurst, Grant D. Jones, Roger S. Durham, and Clark Spencer Larsen. 1978. The Anthropology of St. Catherines Island. 1. Natural and Cultural History. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 55, pt. 2, pp. 155 – 248. http://hdl.handle.net/2246/304. Worth, John E. 1995. The Struggle for the Georgia Coast: An Eighteenth-century Spanish Retrospective on Guale and Mocama. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 75, pp. 1 – 222. http://hdl .handle.net/2246/270. 1998. Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. 2002. Spanish Missions and the Persistence of Chiefly Power. In Robbie Ethridge and Charles Hudson (editors), The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540 – 1760, pp. 39 – 64. Jackson, University Press of Mississippi. 2004. Guale. In Raymond D. Fogelson (editor), Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 14: Southeast, pp. 238 – 244. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution. 2007. The Struggle for the Georgia Coast (reprint of 1995 edition with expanded preface). Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press.

the spanish missions of georgia Andrews, Evangeline W. and Charles M. Andrews (editors) 1975. Jonathan Dickinson’s Journal or, God’s Protecting Providence. Stuart, Florida, Valentine Books. suggestions for further reading

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Bolton, Herbert E., and Mary Ross 1925. The Debatable Land. Berkeley, University of California Press. Bushnell, Amy Turner 1994. Situado and Sabana: Spain’s Support System of the Presidio and Mission Provinces of Florida. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 74, pp. 1 – 249. http://hdl.handle .net/2246/269. Dunlop, Captain 1929. Journall Capt. Dunlop’s Voyage to the Southward, 1687. South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 127 – 33. Floyd, Marmaduke 1937. Certain Tabby Ruins on the Georgia Coast. In Coulter, E. Merton (editor), Georgia’s Disputed Ruins. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, pp. 3 – 187. Francis, John Michael and Kathleen M. Kole 2011. Politics, Murder and Martyrdom in Spanish Florida: Don Juan and the Guale Uprising of 1597. Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, in press. Hann, John H. 1990. Summary Guide to Florida Missions and Visitas with Churches in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Americas, vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 417 – 513. Hann, John H. and Bonnie G. McEwan 1998. The Apalachee Indians and Mission San Luis. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. Larson, Lewis H., Jr. 1980. The Spanish on Sapelo. In Juengst, D. P. (editor), Sapelo Papers: Researches in the History and Prehistory of Sapelo Island, Georgia. West Georgia College Studies in the Social Sciences, vol. 19, pp. 35 – 45. McEwan, Bonnie G. (editor) 1993. The Spanish Missions of La Florida. Gainesville, University Press of Florida.

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spanish colonization of la florida Boyd, Mark F., Hale G. Smith, and John W. Griffin 1951. Here They Once Stood: The Tragic End of the Apalachee Missions. Gainesville, University of Florida Press. Bushnell, Amy 1981. The King’s Coffer: Proprietors of the Spanish Florida Treasury 1565 – 1702. Gainesville, University Presses of Florida. Cook, Jeannine 1992. Columbus and the Land of Ayllón. Darien, Georgia, Lower Altamaha Historical Society. Deagan, Kathleen 1982. St. Augustine: First Urban Enclave in the United States. North American Archaeologist, vol. 3, no. 3, pp. 183 – 205. 1983. Spanish St. Augustine: The Archaeology of a Colonial Creole Community. New York, Academic Press. 1985. Spanish-Indian Interaction in Sixteenth-century Florida and Hispaniola. In William W. Fitzhugh (editor), Cultures in Contact. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution, pp. 281 – 318. 1987. Artifacts of the Spanish Colonies of Florida and the Caribbean 1500 – 1800. Vol. 1: Ceramics, Glassware, and Beads. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution. Deagan, Kathleen and David Hurst Thomas (editors and contributors) 2009. From Santa Elena to St. Augustine: Indigenous Ceramic Variability (a.d. 1400 – 1700). Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 90, pp. 1 – 229. http://hdl.handle .net/2246/5987. Fitzhugh, William W. (editor) 1985. Cultures in Contact: The European Impact on Native Cultural Institutions in Eastern North America. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press. Gannon, Michael V. 1965. The Cross in the Sand: The Early Catholic Church in Florida, 1513 – 1870. Gainesville, University of Florida Press. (reprinted 1967).

suggestions for further reading

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Hoffman, Paul E. 1980. The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535 – 1585: Precedent, Patrimonialism and Royal Parsimony. Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press. Lyon, Eugene 1976. The Enterprise of Florida: Pedro Menendez de Aviles and the Spanish Conquest of 1565 – 1568. Gainesville, University Presses of Florida. 1977. St. Augustine 1580: The Living Community. El Escribano, vol. 14, pp. 20 – 33. 1984. Santa Elena: A Brief History of the Colony, 1566 – 1587. Columbia, University of South Carolina, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research Manuscript Series, no. 193. Mendelson, Johanna (compiler) 1979. Mary Letitia Ross Papers: A Descriptive Inventory. Paul Ellingson (editor) Atlanta, Georgia Department of Archives and History. Milanich, Jerald T. 1999. Laboring in the Fields of the Lord: Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press. Milanich, Jerald T., and William C. Sturtevant 1972. Francisco Pareja’s 1613 Confessionario: A Documentary Source for Timucuan Ethnography. Tallahassee, Florida Division of Archives, History, and Records Management. Solis de Menis, Gonzalo 1922. Pedro Menendez de Aviles. Trans. Jeannette Thurber Connor. DeLand, Florida State Historical Society. Facsimile ed., Gainesville, University of Florida Press, 1964. South, Stanley 1979. The Search for Santa Elena on Parris Island, South Carolina. University of South Carolina, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, Research Manuscript Series, no. 150. Washburn, Wilcomb E. 1985. The Southeast in an Age of Conflict and Revolution. In R. Reid Badger and Lawrence A. Clayton (editors), Alabama and the Borderlands: From Prehistory to Statehood. University, University of Alabama Press, pp. 143 – 53. 88 @ suggestions for further reading

Waterbury, Jean Parker (editor) 1983. The Oldest City: St. Augustine, Saga of Survival. St. Augustine, St. Augustine Historical Society. Wenhold, Lucy L. (translator) 1936. A 17th Century Letter of Gabriel Díaz Vara Calderón, Bishop of Cuba, Describing the Indians and Indian Missions of Florida. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 95, no. 16.

the early hispanic colonization of america Bolton, Herbert E. 1917. The Mission as a Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies. American Historical Review, vol. 23, pp. 42 – 61. 1921. The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest. New Haven, Yale University Press. Lightfoot, Kent G. 2005. Indians, Missionaries, and Merchants: The Legacy of Colonial Encounters on the California Frontiers. Berkeley, University of California Press. Spicer, Edward H. 1962. Cycles of Conquest: The Impact of Spain, Mexico, and the United States on the Indians of the Southwest, 1533 – 1960. Tucson, University of Arizona Press. Thomas, David Hurst (editor) 1989. Columbian Consequences. Vol. 1: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press. 1990. Columbian Consequences. Vol. 2: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands East. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press. 1991. Columbian Consequences. Vol. 3: The Spanish Borderlands in Pan-American Perspective. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press. Weber, David J. 1992. The Spanish Frontier in North America. New Haven, Yale University Press. suggestions for further reading

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Zèndegui, Guillermo de 1977. City Planning in the Spanish Colonies. Americas, Supplement, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. s1 – s12.

contemporary field and laboratory methods in archaeology Dincauze, Dena. 2000. Environmental Archaeology: Principles and Practice. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Kelly, Robert L. and David Hurst Thomas 2010. Archaeology. 5th ed. New York, Wadsworth Cengage Learning. 2011. Archaeology: Down to Earth. 4th ed. New York, Wadsworth Publishers. Larsen, Clark Spencer. 1997. Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Purdy, Barbara A. 1996. How to Do Archaeology the Right Way. Gainesville, University Press of Florida. Reitz, Elizabeth J., and Elizabeth S. Wing. 1999. Zooarchaeology. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Thomas, David Hurst 2000. Native North America. Oxford, Oxford University Press. 2001. Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity. Rev. ed. New York, Basic Books.

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About the Author j @j@j@ Since 1972, David Hurst Thomas has served as curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York; for seven years, he was chairman of the Department of Anthropology. He has taught at Columbia University; New York University; the University of California, Davis; the University of Florida; the University of Nevada; and the City College of New York, and he has lectured in more than forty countries. A specialist in Native American archaeology, he holds four degrees from the University of California, Davis (PhD, 1971) and a doctor of science (honoris causa) from the University of the South (conferred 1995). In 1970, he discovered Gatecliff Shelter (Nevada), the deepest archaeological rockshelter in the Americas. Thomas also discovered and systematically excavated the sixteenthand seventeenth-century Franciscan mission Santa Catalina de Guale (St. Catherines Island, Georgia). In recognition of this research, Thomas received the Franciscan Institute Medal for 1992; he is the only non-Franciscan ever to be so honored. Since 1998, he has led excavations at Mission San Marcos near Santa Fe, New Mexico. Thomas has written thirty books, edited ninety additional volumes, and written more than one hundred scientific papers. His most recent book is the best-selling Skull Wars: Kennewick Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identity (Basic Books, 2000, 2001). A member of the Writer’s Guild of America, he wrote the first six chapters for the award-winning The Native Americans (Turner Publishing), the book accompanying the documentary The Native Americans: Behind the Legends, Beyond the Myths produced by Turner Broadcasting. Thomas is listed in Who’s Who in America, Who’s Who in Social Science, Who’s Who of American Writers, International Who’s Who of Professionals, Who’s Who Reference Encyclopedia of the American Indian, International Authors and Writers Who’s Who, and The Writers Directory. Thomas served as the U.S. editor for The Illustrated History of Humankind, a trailblazing five-volume set (Harper, San Francisco). Publishers Weekly called the first volume of The Illustrated History “a stunning achievement and a book

to treasure.” Thomas spearheaded the national marketing campaign for this series, including a coast-to-coast book tour in 1993. Thomas is instigator and general editor of the three-volume Columbian Consequences series (Smithsonian Institution Press), to which he is also a contributor; two of these volumes were selected as Outstanding Scholarly Books of the Year by Choice magazine. Other books include Exploring Native America (2000), Exploring Ancient Native America (1994, 1999), Archaeology (1979, 1989, 1998, 2006, 2010), Archaeology: Down to Earth (1991, 1999, 2007, 2011), St. Catherines: An Island in Time (1988), Refiguring Anthropology: First Principles of Probability and Statistics (1986), Predicting the Past: An Introduction to Anthropological Archaeology (1974), and Gatecliff: Dwelling in the Desert (1974). His scientific writings address a range of topics in prehistoric and historical archaeology. He serves as general editor for The North American Indian (twenty-one volumes, Garland Publishing), The Spanish Borderlands Sourcebooks (twenty-seven volumes, Garland Publishing), and the thirty-onevolume Evolution of North American Indians (Garland Publishing). Thomas was awarded the Presidential Recognition Award by the Society for American Archaeology (1991), and his archaeological research has been featured in the New York Times, National Geographic, Natural History, Archaeology, Museum Magazine, a half-hour National Geographic film (Gatecliff: Dwelling in the Desert, 1974), and two books for children titled From Maps to Museums: Uncovering Mysteries of the Past (by Joan Anderson, William Morrow, Inc., 1988), awarded Notable Children’s Trade Book and Outstanding Science Trade Book, and Native Americans (with Lorann Pendleton, The Nature Company, Discoveries series, 1995). In 1989, the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution appointed Thomas as a founding trustee of the National Museum of the American Indian, where he was unanimously elected as vice chairman of the board. That same year, Thomas was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1990, Thomas initiated the Native American Scholarship Fund through the Society for American Archaeology.

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