The Timucua

This is the story of the Timucua, an American Indian people who thrived for centuries in the southeast portion of what is now the United States of America.

Timucua groups lived in Northern Florida and Southern Georgia, a region occupied by native people for thirteen millennia. They were among the first of the American Indians to come in contact with Europeans, when the Spaniard Juan Ponce de Leon landed on the Florida coast in 1513. Thousands of archaeological sites, village middens and sand and shell mounds still dot the landscape, offering mute testimony to the former presence of the Timucua and their ancestors.

Two hundred and fifty years after Ponce de Leon′s voyage the Timucua had disappeared, extinguished by the ravages of colonialism. Who were the Timucua? Where did they come from? How did they live? What caused their extinction? These are questions this book attempts to answer, using information gathered from archaeological excavations and from the interpretation of historical documents left behind by the European powers, mainly Spain and France, who sought to colonize Florida and to place the Timucua under their sway.

Preface.

1. The Beginning.

2. Who Were the Timucua?.

3. The Invasion.

4. Spanish Missions.

5. Mission Settlements and Subsistence.

6. The Organization of Societies.

7. Beliefs and Behavior.

8. The End.

Bibliography.

Jerald T. Milanich is Curator in Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. His ten previous books include Florida Archaeology (1980), The Early Prehistoric Southeast (Garland, 1985) and First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the United States, 1492–1570 (1989). With the exception of a year′s post–doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, Jerald Milanich has spent some thirty years in Florida researching the nature of past and present American Indian societies of the American southeast.

"This excellent anthrohistorical work should be in the library of everyone interested in Native Americans." Choice