Cosmopolitan Meanings of Old Spanish Fields: Historical Archaeology of a Maroon Community in Southwest Florida

Abstract

Since 2005, a multidisciplinary public anthropology program has been looking for Angola, an early-19th-century maroon community south of Tampa Bay. Angola provides a link between the beacons of freedom in the northern tier of Florida (Fort Mose, Prospect Bluff, and the Suwannee settlements) and the later settlements of African Seminoles in the Bahamas and Central Florida. With few documentary resources available, a map is used as an entry point to the lifeways of the maroons of Florida. While labeled Old Spanish Fields, the location represents a place where diverse individuals came together as maroons and interacted with Seminoles, British filibusters, and Cuban fishermen, among others, in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. Their crops indicate the resilience of the peoples who fought for their freedom from slavery. With American rule, the community was devastated, its landscape erased, and the cosmopolitan community unmixed.