Founded in 1565, St. Augustine was the multicultural, and often embattled, outpost of the Spanish empire. St. Augustine's economic, political, and religious power was reflected in other towns and villages that stretched across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. Scholars frequently refer to this broad swath of territories as the "Spanish Borderlands." Of those who accompanied the Spanish to these lands, it was members of the Franciscan Order who, as missionaries, had the most direct contact and interaction with the diverse populations of American Indians. As the 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine drew near, scholars from the Americas and Europe gathered on Mar 13-15, 2014, for the conference, "Franciscan Florida in Pan-Borderlands Perspective: Adaptation, Negotiation, and Resistance" at Flagler College in St. Augustine. The expressed intent of the gathering was, as David Hurst Thomas writes in the Introduction, to "address issues of acculturation, political and economic relations, religious conversions, and the nature of multiethnic relationships across the Spanish Borderlands." The result is a rich collection of essays from anthropologists, archaeologists, linguists, historians, and theologians. Diverse contributions of the Navajo, Hopi, and California tribal members in attendance was a reminder of the complexity of the thematic and an on-going challenge to continue research into new, and yet unexplored territories.

Catholicism and Native Americans in Early North America interrogates the profound cultural impacts of Catholic policies and practice in La Florida during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Catholicism and Native Americans in Early North America explores the ways in which the church negotiated the founding of a Catholic society in colonial America, beginning in St. Augustine, Florida, in 1565. Although the church was deeply involved in all aspects of daily life and institutional organization, the book underscores the tensions inherent in creating and sustaining a Catholic tradition in an unfamiliar and socially diverse population. Using new primary academic scholarship, the contributors explore missionaries’ accommodations to Catholic practice in the process of conversion; the ways in which social and racial differentiation were played out in the treatment of the dead; Native literacy and the production of religious texts; the impacts of differing conversion philosophies among various religious orders; and the historical and theological backgrounds of Catholicism in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century America. Bringing together insights from archaeology, social history, linguistics, and theology, this groundbreaking volume moves beyond the missions to reveal how Native people, friars, secular priests, and Spanish parishioners practiced Catholicism across what is now the southeastern United States. Contributors: Kathleen Deagan, Keith Ashley, George Aaron Broadwell, José Antonio Crespo-Francés Y Valero, Timothy J. Johnson, Rochelle Marrinan, Susan Richbourg Parker, David Hurst Thomas, Gifford Waters

Methods, Mounds, and Missions offers innovative ways of looking at existing data, as well as compelling new information, about Florida’s past. Diverse in scale, topic, time, and region, the volume’s contributions span the late Archaic through historic periods and cover much of the state’s panhandle and peninsula, with forays into the larger Southeast and circum-Caribbean area. Subjects explored in this volume include coastal ring middens, chiefly power and social interaction in mound-building societies, pottery design and production, faunal evidence of mollusk harvesting, missions and missionaries, European iron celts or chisels, Hernando de Soto’s sixteenth-century expedition, and an early nineteenth-century Seminole settlement. The essays incorporate previously underexplored markers of culture histories such as clay sources and non-chert lithic tools and address complex issues such as the entanglement of utilitarian artifacts with sociocultural and ritual realms. Experts in their topical specializations, this volume’s contributors build on the research methods and interpretive approaches of influential anthropologist Jerald Milanich. They update current archaeological interpretations of Florida history, developing and demonstrating the use of new and improved tools to answer broader and larger questions. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

In a dynamic near half-century career of insight, engagement, and instruction, Kent G. Lightfoot transformed North American archaeology through his innovative ideas, robust collaborations, thoughtful field projects, and mentoring of numerous students. Authors emphasize the multifarious ways Lightfoot impacted—and continues to impact—approaches to archaeological inquiry, anthropological engagement, indigenous issues, and professionalism. Four primary themes include: negotiations of intercultural entanglements in pluralistic settings; transformations of temporal and spatial archaeological dimensions, as well as theoretical and methodological innovations; engagement with contemporary people and issues; and leading by example with honor, humor, and humility. These reflect the remarkable depth, breadth, and growth in Lightfoot’s career, despite his unwavering stylistic devotion to Hawaiian shirts.

The untold history of slavery and resistance in California, from the Spanish missions, indentured Native American ranch hands, Indian boarding schools, Black miners, kidnapped Chinese prostitutes, and convict laborers to victims of modern trafficking “A searing survey of ‘250 years of human bondage’ in what is now the state of California. . . . Readers will be outraged.”—Publishers Weekly California owes its origins and sunny prosperity to slavery. Spanish invaders captured Indigenous people to build the chain of Catholic missions. Russian otter hunters shipped Alaska Natives—the first slaves transported into California—and launched a Pacific slave triangle to China. Plantation slaves were marched across the plains for the Gold Rush. San Quentin Prison incubated California’s carceral state. Kidnapped Chinese girls were sold in caged brothels in early San Francisco. Indian boarding schools supplied new farms and hotels with unfree child workers. By looking west to California, Jean Pfaelzer upends our understanding of slavery as a North-South struggle and reveals how the enslaved in California fought, fled, and resisted human bondage. In unyielding research and vivid interviews, Pfaelzer exposes how California gorged on slavery, an appetite that persists today in a global trade in human beings lured by promises of jobs but who instead are imprisoned in sweatshops and remote marijuana grows, or sold as nannies and sex workers. Slavery shreds California’s utopian brand, rewrites our understanding of the West, and redefines America’s uneasy paths to freedom.

This volume presents new data and interpretations from research at Florida’s Spanish missions, outposts established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to strengthen the colonizing empire and convert Indigenous groups to Christianity. In these chapters, archaeologists, historians, and ethnomusicologists draw on the past thirty years of work at sites from St. Augustine to the panhandle. Contributors explore the lived experiences of the Indigenous people, Franciscan friars, and Spanish laypeople who lived in La Florida’s mission communities. In the process, they address missionization, ethnogenesis, settlement, foodways, conflict, and warfare. One study reconstructs the sonic history of Mission San Luis with soundscape compositions. The volume also sheds light on the destruction of the Apalachee-Spanish missions by the English. The recent investigations highlighted here significantly change earlier understandings by emphasizing the kind and degree of social, economic, and ideological relationships that existed between Apalachee and Timucuan communities and the Spanish. Unearthing the Missions of Spanish Florida updates and rewrites the history of the Spanish mission effort in the region. Contributors: Rachel M. Bani | Mark J Sciuhetti Jr | Rochelle A. Marrinan | Nicholas Yarbrough | Jerald T. Milanich | Jerry W Lee | Rebecca Douberly-Gorman | Alissa Slade Lotane | John E. Worth | Jonathan Sheppard | Laura Zabanal | Keith Ashley | Tanya M. Peres | Sarah Eyerly A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Between 1769 and 1834, an influx of Spanish, Russian, and then American colonists streamed into Alta California seeking new opportunities. Their arrival brought the imposition of foreign beliefs, practices, and constraints on Indigenous peoples. Forging Communities in Colonial Alta California reorients understandings of this dynamic period, which challenged both Native and non-Native people to reimagine communities not only in different places and spaces but also in novel forms and practices. The contributors draw on archaeological and historical archival sources to analyze the generative processes and nature of communities of belonging in the face of rapid demographic change and perceived or enforced difference. Contributors provide important historical background on the effects that colonialism, missions, and lives lived beyond mission walls had on Indigenous settlement, marriage patterns, trade, and interactions. They also show the agency with which Indigenous peoples make their own decisions as they construct and reconstruct their communities. With nine different case studies and an insightful epilogue, this book offers analyses that can be applied broadly across the Americas, deepening our understanding of colonialism and community. Contributors: Julienne Bernard James F. Brooks John Dietler Stella D’Oro John G. Douglass John Ellison Glenn Farris Heather Gibson Kathleen L. Hull Linda Hylkema John R. Johnson Kent G. Lightfoot Lee M. Panich Sarah Peelo Seetha N. Reddy David W. Robinson Tsim D. Schneider Christina Spellman Benjamin Vargas