Glass Beads and Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: A Social Network Approach to Exploring Identity in the Colonial Southeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Beads and other ornaments were important objects involved in early colonial entanglements between Europeans and Native Americans, with the color, texture, and physical properties of beads fostering the embodiment of new social roles within changing colonial worlds. In this paper I discuss how such objects were involved in the material manifestation of social identities as pluralistic native communities aggregated in the Spanish missions of La Florida. Looking specifically at the aggregated population of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, a 17th century mission located on St. Catherines Island, Georgia, I use the methods of social network analysis to explore how mission neophytes utilized European glass trade beads to both foster the persistence of social identities and to create new communities in the context of population aggregation. Presenting a bipartite network reconstruction of the Santa Catalina community, I discuss how individuals and objects of adornment acted together to materialize changing colonial identities.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Ornamentation: New Approaches to Adornment and Colonialism   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 874