An Analysis of Trade Beads Excavated from the Tristán de Luna Settlement Site and Their Significance

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

A diverse assemblage of glass beads has been excavated from the ill-fated 1559-1561 Tristán de Luna settlement site in Pensacola, Florida. These beads were part of the assortment of trade goods brought on the expedition as gifts or for exchange with Native American groups along the anticipated expedition route and its settlements. Since many other beads from this same assemblage were indeed distributed along the routes of military detachments sent by Luna as far inland as northern Alabama and Georgia, it is of no small significance that the bead assemblage recovered from the Luna site shares many similarities with those associated with Hernando de Soto's 1539-1543 expedition that visited many of the same interior regions. This paper provides the first synthetic characterization of the Luna settlement trade bead assemblage and offers some new avenues of interpretation in bead chronology and their presence on Native sites found in the interior Southeast.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2022 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology