Distrust Thy Neighbor: Examining Reservation Period Camps through Tribal Archaeology and Story Mapping

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The most recent history of the Seminole Tribe of Florida (STOF) and its settlement on Federal Trust land is little understood. Settling onto the various reservations in the 1930s, community members organized the layout and location of their camps based on sociohistorical beliefs stemming from a distrust of their new American neighbors counterbalanced by the need to rely on reservation period infrastructure and access to commodities and services. These historic settlements are noticeable in the bottles, tin cans, and other remnant artifacts, but contain a much more powerful history with the addition of oral histories of the community members that took part in these early reservation settlements. Noting the shifts in camp location and organization over a broad period tells a story of important community functions and the evolution of the reservations. The various locational and content changes of these settlements are recorded by the Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO), who then uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to draw together the oral history and archaeological information in the telling of these important stories.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Recognizing and Recording Post-1492 Indigenous Sites in North American Archaeology   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23718