“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

"For those working on the 17th-century frontiers of the Spanish Empire as archaeologists and historians, Worth's study is an absolute necessity. Using previously unknown primary material found during his research in Spain, he has rewritten the history of the Timucuan province of the Spanish colony of La Florida, and reassessed the history of colonial Florida itself. The new information he presents on the relationship between the Franciscan missionaries and local peoples will by itself require extensive rethinking of the frontier mission method. Worth does for Florida what H. H. Bancroft and France Scholes have done for California and the Southwest—landmark scholarship."—James Ivey, Research Historian for the Southwest Cluster of the National Park Service

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):

Table of Contents

Excerpt

Timucuan Chiefdoms is a scholarly work and not a fast read. But sipping rather than gulping works just fine." -- Florida Times-Union
--Florida Times-Union

"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

"[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

"Worth's two-volume work is a thorough, scholarly, and well-documented analysis of the Timucua Native Americans. Scholars will consider this careful and well-balanced work a benchmark of excellence in the religious history of Florida." -- Catholic Southwest
--Catholic Southwest

"Worth has uncovered a wealth of data that adds considerably to our understanding of the Timucua. What makes his primary historical research somewhat unusual is that Worth brings to it the added dimension of an archaeologist's perspective. . . . Part cultural reconstruction and part testing ground for new interpretations of Timucuan/Spanish sites of the early historic period, Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida provides a thought-provoking reading." -- St. Augustine Archaeological Association
--St. Augustine Archaeological Association (Newsletter)