From Producers to Consumers: Exploring the Role of Florida’s Eighteenth-Century Refugee Mission

John Worth

From Producers to Consumers: Exploring the Role of Florida’s Eighteenth-Century Refugee Mission

Author(s): John Worth

Year: 2016

Summary

Between the late sixteenth and mid seventeenth century, the multiethnic colony of Spanish Florida grew by assimilating indigenous chiefdoms into an expanding colonial system defined by missionization and fueled by the production of large quantities of surplus staple foods using Indian land and labor. Rampant demographic collapse augmented by slave raiding by English-backed native groups resulted in the collapse and retreat of Florida’s formerly far-flung mission system by the early eighteenth century into coastal zones surrounding three Spanish garrisons, including St. Augustine, Pensacola, and St. Marks. There, Florida’s few hundred remaining mission Indians huddled in a handful of refugee communities, increasingly reliant on protection and food and other provisions provided to them by the Spanish. Documentary and archaeological evidence provides an opportunity to gain new insights into the role of Florida’s refugee missions and how the lives of their inhabitants differed from that of their mission ancestors.

Cite this Record

From Producers to Consumers: Exploring the Role of Florida’s Eighteenth-Century Refugee Mission. John Worth. Presented at Society for Historical Archaeology, Washington, D.C. 2016 ( tDAR id: 434790)