Reviewed by: Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism Charles R. Ewen Clark Spencer Larsen, Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: The Impact of Colonialism. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001) Archaeology in general, and bioarchaeology in particular, have often been viewed as “handmaidens to history,” supplementing the historical record with occasional tidbits that confirm what we already know. Larsen convincingly demonstrates that this view of archaeology does not do justice to the work he and his colleagues have been undertaking in the southeastern United States. If the past is a crime scene and historians are detectives who take depositions from the witnesses, then archaeologists are crime scene investigators, who use forensic techniques to get at an unbiased interpretation of past events. Four questions regarding Native Americans during the Colonial Period frame this book’s research: 1) when and how did diet change for the native inhabitants of La Florida (the southeastern United States); 2) how did physical activity, workload and behavioral strategy in general change; 3) how did physiological stress change over the time frame; 4) what were the biological relationships of native populations in this setting? Contributors explore each of these questions in light of their implications for interpreting Native health, diet, and lifeways before and after European contact. The book’s organization is excellent. It begins by presenting the research goals and follows with a historical and archaeological background. Then the individual researchers present their work in excruciating detail, complete with all of their original data. The book concludes with an essay that reiterates the major points, puts them in broader perspective, and then suggests where the work needs to go next. The opening ethnohistory by Worth incorporates his interpretation as to the consequences of contact and the mission system. This is followed by an archaeological synthesis by Larsen who dispels the myth that the pre-Columbian New World was a disease-free environment. He enumerates many of the new analytical techniques that are allowing us to go beyond written record, setting the stage for the case studies that follow. Each of these studies focuses on a particular technique to examine past health, diet and lifeways. In the first, Larsen, Hutchinson, Schoeninger and Norr apply isotope analysis to skeletons recovered from archaeological sites. The major constituents of the diet are reflected in the bone chemistry (you are what you eat!). The authors discover maize was not predominant everywhere in the prehistoric diet. Ruff and Larsen then find, using skeletal analysis, that the evidence of bone breakage and arthritis tends to support the documentary record that speaks to the harsh working conditions of the Spanish Mission Period (AD 1587–1706). Several studies use data provided by dental analyses. Teaford, Larsen, Pastor and Noble compare dental micro-wear in pre- & post-contact populations and find that the bulk of the differences are due to habitat (coastal vs. inland) rather than diet. Simpson examined the defects in dental enamel and notes that there is a marked decline in health from the early prehistoric (400 BC–AD 1000) to late Mission Period (AD 1680–1706). On the other hand, Hutchinson & Larsen’s study of enamel hypoplasias (growth arrest lines on teeth) found that the late prehistoric populations actually experienced more stress than did the later mission populations. Switching the focus from teeth to bones, Schultz, Larsen, and Kreutz note that the Mission Period shows an increase in disease due to a maize-based diet. Griffin, Lambert and Driscoll estimate biological distance between Native American skeletal samples in the Southeast and they discover that the Native American populations along the Florida and Georgia coasts are not biologically continuous. The seemingly incongruous conclusions of the various case studies are nicely reconciled in the final chapter. In this concluding essay, Walker examines the bioarchaeology of La Florida from the broader perspective of the Spanish Borderlands. He observes that health was declining prior to contact not only in Spanish Florida but also in the North American southwest due to population aggregation and the introduction of agriculture. He goes on to state that it is becoming increasingly clear from archaeological and documentary evidence that the demographic collapse of Native American populations varied greatly from region to region...
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Jun 1, 2007
Alkes L Price + 27
