The books in the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series demonstrate the University Press of Florida's long history of publishing Latin American and Caribbean studies titles that connect in and through Florida, highlighting the connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. Books in this series show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers, both foreign and domestic. They examine topics critical to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, and tourism. They look at the growth of Florida and the Caribbean and the attendant pressures on the environment, culture, urban development, and the movement of peoples, both forced and voluntary. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series gathers the rich data available in these architectural, archaeological, cultural, and historical works, as well as the travelogues and naturalists' sketches of the area in prior to the twentieth century, making it accessible for scholars and the general public alike. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program.

Who are Florida's Seminole and Miccosukee Indians? Where did they come from? How and why are they different from one another, and what cultural and historical features do they share? Brent Weisman explores Seminole and Miccosukee culture through information provided by archaeology, ethnography, historical documents, and the words of the Indians themselves. He explains when and how their culture was formed and how it has withstood historical challenges and survives in the face of pressures from the modern world. Focusing on key elements of ceremony and history, Weisman examines the origins and persistence of the Green Corn Dance, the importance of the clan in determining political and social relationships, and the crucial role of the Second Seminole War (1835-42) and its aftermath in stimulating cultural adaptation as the entire Indian population was forced deep into the remote wetlands of south Florida. Throughout, he emphasizes the remarkable ability of the Seminoles to adapt successfully to changing circumstances while preserving their core identity, from the colonial period through the present day. Noting the importance of geography for understanding a people's identity, Weisman adds a travel guide to publicly accessible historic sites throughout the state that tell of the unique and deep connection between Seminole history and the geography of Florida. Illustrating the range of the Seminoles well beyond the familiar south Florida region, he explains the importance in Seminole history of the Suwannee River and the Paynes Prairie area of north-central Florida, the Withlacoochee River wetlands of central Florida, the Big Cypress region of southwest Florida, and the Pine Island Ridge of the eastern Everglades. For both students and general readers, Weisman combines scholarship from several disciplines with the perspectives of the Seminoles themselves into an exciting history of Florida's enduring Native Americans.

"A survey of the current state of study of indigenous Caribbean people by archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists. . . . Emphasizes that even though indigenous people were the victims of genocide, they helped to establish a persistent pattern of relations between other Caribbean settlers and their environment, and became central symbols of Caribbean identity and resistance to colonialism. . . . Strongly recommended for every library concerned with Caribbean and native American studies."-"Choice" "An excellent introduction to native peoples of the Caribbean region. . . . Will be useful to anthropologists, historians, and other social scientists working in the Caribbean."--Jerald T. Milanich, Florida Museum of Natural History This volume brings together nineteen Caribbean specialists to produce the first general introduction to the indigenous peoples of that region. Writing for both general and academic audiences, contributors provide an authoritative, up-to-date picture of these fascinating peoples--their social organization, religion, language, lifeways, and contribution to the culture of their modern descendants--in what is ultimately a comprehensive reader on Caribbean archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnology. CONTENTS 1. Introduction, Samuel M. Wilson Part 1: Background to the Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Caribbean 2. The Study of Aboriginal Peoples: Multiple Ways of Knowing, Ricardo Alegria 3. The Lesser Antilles Before Columbus, Louis Allaire Part 2: The Encounter 4. The Biological Impacts of 1492, Richard L. Cunningham 5. The Salt River Site, St. Croix, at the Time of the Encounter, Birgit Faber Morse 6. European Views of the Aboriginal Population, Alissandra Cummins Part 3: The First Migration of Village Farmers, 500 B.C. to A.D. 800 7. Settlement Strategies in the Early Ceramic Age, Jay B. Haviser 8. The Ceramics, Art, and Material Culture of the Early Ceramic Period in the Caribbean Islands, Elizabeth Righter 9. Religious Beliefs of the Saladoid People, Miguel Rodriguez 10. Maritime Trade in the Prehistoric Eastern Caribbean, David R. Watters 11. Notes on Ancient Caribbean Art and Mythology, Henry Petitjean Roget Part 4: The Taino of the Greater Antilles on the Eve of Conquest 12. "No Man (or Woman) Is an Island" Elements of Taino Social Organization, William F. Keegan 13. Taino, Island Carib, and Prehistoric Amerindian Economies in the West Indies: Tropical Forest Adaptations to Island Environments, James B. Petersen 14. The Material Culture of the Taino Indians, Ignacio Olazagasti 15. The Taino Cosmos, Jose R. Oliver 16. Some Observations on the Taino Language, Arnold R. Highfield 17. The Taino Vision: A Study in the Exchange of Misunderstanding, Henry Petitjean Roget Part 5: The Island Caribs of the Lesser Antilles 18. The Caribs of the Lesser Antilles, Louis Allaire 19. Language and Gender among the Kalinago of 15th Century St. Croix, Vincent O. Cooper Part 6: Indigenous Resistance and Survival 20. The Garifuna of Central America, Nancie L. Gonzalez 21. The Legacy of the Indigenous People of the Caribbean, Samuel M. Wilson 22. Five Hundred Years of Indigenous Resistance, Garnette Joseph Samuel M. Wilson is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. He is author of "Hispaniola: Caribbean Chiefdoms in the Age of Columbus "(1990), coeditor of "Ethnohistory and Archaeology: Approaches to Postcontact Change in the Americas" (1993), and a contributing editor and columnist for" Natural History" magazine.

Early European descriptions of North America tell about a landscape and a variety of cultures in northeast Florida -- a region that had been occupied by native people for more than 10,000 years -- that were unlike anything the explorers and settlers had ever encountered. This story of the land and people in that region of the St. Johns River and the Atlantic coast covers 18,000 years -- from the Ice Age to the first half of the twentieth century.

James Miller describes how natural features and cultural traditions were transformed and influenced by each other. Native Americans as well as Spanish, English, and American colonists developed unique cultural responses to opportunities and constraints of a changing environment. With an unusually broad scope in time, space, and subject matter, he uses the example of northeast Florida to explore the notion of environmental equilibrium, to illustrate the fallacy of a pristine environment, and to show how essential environmental history is to modern ecological planning.

Fully illustrated with 25 photographs and 40 maps and written in an accessible style that synthesizes material usually accessible only to specialists, the book will appeal to general readers and policy planners as well as specialists. No comparable environmental history of any Florida region exists.

From the foreword:
"With this important volume, the editors serve notice that old characterizations of the cultures of the Archaic period have been buried under the back dirt of new excavations and new interpretations. . . . It places the Archaic cultures squarely at the forefront of archaeological theory."

This volume summarizes our archaeological knowledge of natives who inhabited the American Southeast from 8,000 to 3,000 years ago and examines evidence of many of the native cultural expressions observed by early European explorers, including long-distance exchange, plant domestication, mound building, social ranking, and warfare.

Contents
Section I. Mid-Holocene Environments

1. Geoarchaeology and the Mid-Holocene Landscape History of the Greater Southeast, by Joseph Schuldenrein

2. Mid-Holocene Forest History of Florida and the Coastal Plain of Georgia and South Carolina, by William A. Watts, Eric C. Grimm, and T. C. Hussey

Section II. Technology

3. Changing Strategies of Lithic Technological Organization, by Daniel S. Amick and Philip J. Carr

4. Technological Innovations in Economic and Social Contexts, by Kenneth E. Sassaman

5. Middle and Late Archaic Architecture, by Kenneth E. Sassaman and R. Jerald Ledbetter

Section III. Subsistence and Health

6. The Paleoethnobotanical Record for the Mid-Holocene Southeast, by Kristen J. Gremillion

7. Mid-Holocene Faunal Exploitation in the Southeastern United States, by Bonnie W. Styles and Walter E. Klippel

8. Biocultural Inquiry into Archaic Period Populations of the Southeast: Trauma and Occupational Stress, by Maria O. Smith

Section IV. Regional Settlement Variation

9. Approaches to Modeling Regional Settlement in the Archaic Period Southeast, by David G. Anderson

10. Southeastern Mid-Holocene Coastal Settlements, by Michael Russo

11. Accounting for Submerged Mid-Holocene Archaeological Sites in the Southeast: A Case Study from the Chesapeake Bay Estuary, Virginia, by Dennis B. Blanton

Section V. Regional Integration and Organization

12. The Emergence of Long-Distance Exchange Networks in the Southeastern United States, by Richard W. Jefferies

13. A Consideration of the Social Organization of the Shell Mound Archaic, by Cheryl P. Claassen

14. Southeastern Archaic Mounds, by Michael Russo

15. Poverty Point and Greater Southeastern Prehistory: The Culture That Did Not Fit, by Jon L. Gibson

Kenneth E. Sassaman is archaeologist with the Savannah River Archaeological Research Program, South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology, and instructor in the Department of History and Anthropology at Augusta College, Augusta, Georgia. He is the author of "Early Pottery in the Southeast: Tradition and Innovation in Cooking Technology." David G. Anderson is archaeologist with the Southeast Archaeological Center, National Park Service, Tallahassee, Florida. He is the author of "The Savannah River Chiefdoms: Political Change in the Late Prehistoric Southeast." They are coeditors of "The Paleoindian and Early Archaic Southeast."

Author is the premier historian of Native American groups that lived in Florida during period of European colonization. This work - a solid, ground-breaking, in-depth study of the Timucua - is as scholarly and illuminating as his previous works"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 58.

Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador, is legendary in the United States today: counties, cars, caverns, shopping malls and bridges all bear his name. This work explains the historical importance of his expedition, a journey that began at Tampa Bay in 1539 and ended in Arkansas in 1543. De Soto's explorations, the first European penetration of eastern North America, preceded a demographic disaster for the aboriginal peoples in the region. Old World diseases, perhaps introduced by the de Soto expedition and certainly by other Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, killed many thousands of Indians. By the middle of the 18th century only a few remained alive. The de Soto narratives provide the first European account of many of these Indian societies as they were at the time of European contact. This work interprets these and other 16th-century accounts in the light of new archaeological information, resulting in a more comprehensive view of the native peoples. Matching de Soto's camps to sites where artifacts from the de Soto era have been found, the authors reconstruct his route in Florida and at the same time clarify questions about the social geography and political relationships of the Florida Indians. They link names once known only from documents (for example, the Uzita, who occupied territory at the de Soto landing site, and the Aguacaleyquen of north peninsular Florida) to actual archaeological remains and sites.

The books in the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series demonstrate the University Press of Florida's long history of publishing Latin American and Caribbean studies titles that connect in and through Florida, highlighting the connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. Books in this series show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers, both foreign and domestic. They examine topics critical to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, and tourism. They look at the growth of Florida and the Caribbean and the attendant pressures on the environment, culture, urban development, and the movement of peoples, both forced and voluntary. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series gathers the rich data available in these architectural, archaeological, cultural, and historical works, as well as the travelogues and naturalists' sketches of the area in prior to the twentieth century, making it accessible for scholars and the general public alike. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program.

Drawing on the most recent historical and archaeological research, ""First Encounters"" describes the period of early Spanish contact with New World peoples. This series of essays reports original research mounted over the last ten years, a decade of remarkable breakthroughs in knowledge about significant events in the first decades after 1492. In non-technical language the authors invite us to play Watson to their Sherlockian investigations. We are made privy to the modus operandi of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians as they assemble clues from historic documents, topographic features, and excavated artifacts to map out the neighbourhood boundaries of Puerto Rial, Hispaniola, abandoned in 1578, or to establish which sites in the South East United States can legitimately claim that "de Soto slept here". We learn how Columbus's ship ""Nina"" must have smelled on her 1498 voyage, and how the discovery of a pig mandible helped nail down the site of Anhaica, de Soto's 1539-1540 winter camp.

Florida's Indians tells the story of the native societies that have lived in Florida for twelve millennia, from the early hunters at the end of the Ice Age to the modern Seminole, Miccosukee, and Creeks. When the first Indians arrived in what is now Florida, they wrested their livelihood from a land far different from the modern countryside, one that was cooler, drier, and almost twice the size. Thousands of years later European explorers encountered literally hundreds of different Indian groups living in every part of the state. (Today every Florida county contains an Indian archaeological site.) The arrival of colonists brought the native peoples a new world and great changes took place--by the mid-1700s, through warfare, slave raids, and especially epidemics, the population was almost annihilated. Other Indians soon moved into the state, including Creeks from Georgia and Alabama, who were the ancestors of the modern Seminole and Miccosukee Indians. Written for a general audience, this book is lavishly illustrated with full-color drawings and photographs. It skillfully integrates the latest archaeological and historical information about the Sunshine State's Native Americans, connecting the past and present with modern place-names, and it gives a proud voice to Florida's rich Indian heritage.

Jon Gibson confronts the intriguing mystery of Poverty Point, the ruins of a large prehistoric Indian settlement that was home to one of the most fascinating ancient cultures in eastern North America. The 3,500-year-old site in northeastern Louisiana is known for its large, elaborate earthworks - a series of concentric, crescent-shaped dirt rings and bird-shaped mounds. With its imposing 25-mile core, it is one of the largest archaic constructions on American soil. It's also one of the most puzzling - perplexing questions haunt Poverty Point, and archaeologists still speculate about life and culture at the site, its age, how it was created, and if it was at the forefront of an emerging complex society. Gibson's engaging, well-illustrated account of Poverty Point brings to life one of the oldest earthworks of its size in the Western Hemisphere, the hub of a massive exchange network among native American peoples reaching a third of the way across the present-day United States.

The story of America's first permanent English settlement as told through its relationship with Virginia's native peoples. Certificate of Commendation, American Association for State and Local History, 2003 Addressed to specialists and nonspecialists alike, "Before and After Jamestown" introduces the Powhatans--the Native Americans of Virginia's coastal plains, who played an integral part in the life of the Williamsburg and Jamestown settlements--in scenes that span 1,100 years, from just before their earliest contact with non-Indians to the present day. Synthesizing a wealth of documentary and archaeological data, the authors have produced a book at once thoroughly grounded in scholarship and accessible to the general reader. They have also extended the historical account through the native people's long-term adaptation to European immigrants and into the immediate present and their continuing efforts to gain greater recognition as Indians. Illustrated with more than 100 photographs, maps, and drawings, the book also includes an entire chapter, from the Powhatan perspective, on the original English fort at Jamestown. The authors provide suggestions for additional reading for both children and adults as well as a list of Indian-related sites to visit in Virginia.

Spectacular discoveries at Mound C at the Etowah site in Georgia, the result of excavations there and in Mississippi from 1924 to 1928, changed the American perspective of the artistic achievements of prehistoric Native Americans in the eastern United States. These discoveries, in a mound that had supposedly already been excavated under the sponsorship of the Smithsonian Institution in 1883, made up the final major field expedition of Warren King Moorehead, a legendary figure in American archaeology.

The papers, written in the first person and originally published in 1932, at the end of what is considered the humanistic "golden age" of American anthropology, today offer a fresh understanding of the history of American archaeology and of the cultural heritage of prehistoric Native America.

The Etowah site was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.

Writing about a powerful Native American society at the dawn of European contact, Marvin Smith, in a colorfully illustrated book, traces the rise and collapse of the chiefdom of Coosa, located in the Ridge and Valley province of northwestern Georgia and adjacent states.

From humble beginnings, Coosa became one of the most important chiefdoms in the Southeast, dominating a territory from present eastern Tennessee to central Alabama. Following contact with three Spanish expeditions in the sixteenth century, Coosa began its rapid descent. Disease, population movements, political collapse, and changes in subsistence and technology enveloped the population in the ensuing years. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the once powerful chiefdom had been reduced to a few towns in the Creek Confederacy.

Explaining for the first time this remarkable demise, Smith blends historical and archaeological evidence to tell the complex story. Written for a general interest audience and generously illustrated with color and black-and-white photos, Coosa also will be a valuable reference work for the study of the material culture of the contact period.