“The two volumes . . . provide a definitive history of the Timucuan chiefdoms from their pre-Columbian existence to their eighteenth-century extinction. Worth’s work is essential reading for students and scholars of borderlands and colonial Florida anthropology and history. His scholarship is superb, and he employs primary source materials unknown to previous researchers in the field.”—American Historical Review
 
"Will appeal to a very wide audience that includes scholars in a number of fields, amateur historians and archaeologists, and people interested in Native American studies . . . and will serve as a paradigm for understanding the same developments elsewhere in Spanish Florida and the wider Spanish colonial world."—John H. Hann, author of The Native American World Beyond Apalachee: West Florida and the Chattahoochee Valley



This substantial two-volume work, incorporating the most current archaeological and historical investigation, studies the assimilation and eventual destruction of the indigenous Timucuan societies of interior Spanish Florida near St. Augustine, shedding new light on the nature and function of La Florida's entire mission system.
 
Beginning in volume I with analysis of the late prehistoric chiefdoms, John Worth traces the effects of European exploration and colonization in the late 1500s and describes the expansion of the mission frontier before 1630. As a framework for understanding the Timucuan rebellion of 1654 and its pacification, he explores the internal political and economic structure of the colonial system.
 
In volume II, he shows that after the geographic and political restructuring of the Timucua mission province, the interior of Florida became a populated chain of way-stations along the royal road between St. Augustine and the Apalachee province. Finally, he describes rampant demographic collapse in the missions, followed by English sponsored raids, setting a stage for their final years in Florida during the mid-1700s.
 
The culmination of nearly a decade of original research, these books incorporate many previously unknown or little-used Spanish documentary sources. As an analysis of both the Timucuan chiefdoms and their integration into the colonial system, they offer important discussion of the colonial experience for indigenous groups across the nation and the rest of the Americas.
 
A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series
 
John E. Worth is associate professor of anthropology at the University of West Florida. He is the editor and translator of Discovering Florida: First-Contact Narratives from Spanish Expeditions along the Lower Gulf Coast.

Sample Chapter(s):

Excerpt

Table of Contents

Awards
Rembert Patrick Book Award - 1999

"The breadth of sources employed in this book, and the details they aford on the infrastructural changes brought about in Timucuan society, make this work a hugely impressive achievement." -- Antiquity
--Antiquity

"Worth's two volumes offer the most thorough investigation of any of Florida's aboriginal cultures. His facility with the documents and his clear style combine to create a history of Timucua that will be the standard for many years. This book should be read by archaeologists, historians and ethnohistorians with an interest in the Timucua, in the First Spanish Period in Florida and in the Spanish frontier in general." - Florida Heritage
--Florida Heritage

"[A] valuable resource for scholars of Indian-European relations and for readers interested in colonial America. He produces a fine anthropological study of the complete assimilation of the Timucuan chiefdoms into the Spanish colonial network. Worth succeeds in providing a model against which future studies of native responses to European invasion may be tested." -- William and Mary Quarterly
--William and Mary Quarterly

"Worth's two volumes offer the most thorough investigation of any of Florida's aboriginal cultures. His facility with the documents and his clear style combine to create a history of the Timucua that will be the standard for many years. This book should be read by archaeologists, historians and ethnohistorians with an interest in the Timucua, in the First Spanish Period in Florida and in the Spanish frontier in general." -- Florida Heritage
--Florida Heritage

"A brilliant work of synthetic history in a deeply learned and carefully argued account of a dynamic relationship between two societies, one in which the symbiotic relationship between them led, not only to the familiar destruction of the native American society, but the failure of the Spanish one as well."-- Sixteenth Century Journal
--Sixteenth Century Journal

"A masterful two-volume study using previously untapped archival sources. Particularly for the reader with some knowledge of the Florida landscape, Worth's words will bring this complex era of colonial interaction between Spaniard and Indian back to life as the author carefully situates the actions and events in their geographic setting. Anthropologists and archaeologists will also gain new perspectives on the processes of cultural transformation affecting aboriginal societies as they become part of the Spanish colonial empire. John Worth's efforts in The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida deserve the widest audience and establish a new benchmark for future research." -American Indian Quarterly
--American Indian Quarterly

"Worth, in this book, has done so much more than his title suggests. This is a study of Spanish imperialism, and of the critically important role that native peoples played in the maintenance and operation of that empire. It is a story that combines the internal politics of native villages, the actions of Franciscan missionaries, the decisions of provincial governors and military officials in St. Augustine, and the imperatives of Spanish Empire in America. Worth has produced a compelling study that is truly trans-Atlantic in scope and multicultural in the best sense of that term." -North Carolina Historical Review
--North Carolina Historical Review

"A masterful study, notable both for its depth of coverage and its overarching anthropological framework. A major contribution to our knowledge of the Timucua chiefdoms and the Spanish colonial enterprise." - Florida Historical Quarterly
--Florida Historical Quarterly