A Comparative Consideration of the Institutions of Governance of the Native American Polities of Florida

Summary

This is an abstract from the "States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives." session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Florida once encompassed a vast landscape of Native American polities prior to and after the arrival of European colonizers. More northern groups in the region relied upon fishing, hunting, and gathering, but also practiced maize agriculture to varying degrees. Further to the south, the vast majority of people living in these areas relied solely upon fishing, hunting, and gathering to support large Indigenous populations that lived in small settlements and densely occupied urban environments. The geopolitical landscape of Florida was not static but rather a dynamic place of alliances, cooperation, and conflict that ebbed and flowed at different spatial scales. In this presentation, I compare institutions of collective action across the Florida political landscape. Specifically, I consider institutions of governance (e.g., councils, longhouses, confederacies, tributary town, royal marriage, etc.) at both intra- and inter-settlement levels among the different polities in the region. This comparative analysis demonstrates that political complexity in the region was not dependent upon agriculture and that similar institutions emerged among different groups under a variety of economic systems. That said, there are key differences among these peoples that suggest how collective action was organized to solve varied societal challenges across the landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• States, Confederacies, and Nations: Reenvisioning Early Large-Scale Collectives.   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38104.0