This edited volume, first conceived in 2007, was designed to honor the long and prolific career of influential Florida archaeologist Jerald T. Milanich. Its contributors comprise three generations of students, all of whom Milanich mentored to various degrees. It is important to keep in mind this overarching purpose when considering what the book is not. As editors Ann S. Cordell and Jeffrey M. Mitchem make clear, the book is not an updated synthesis of Florida's precolumbian or contact period history, as is evident from the near absence of content related to the Paleoindian and Archaic periods. Nor, given its inclusion of works from past decades alongside new research, is it a true showcase of the most current, up-to-date archaeological approaches or breakthroughs in Florida archaeology. The volume instead consists of a heterogeneous sampling of disparate topics, time periods, and ideas that fittingly reflect the famously diverse interests and specialties of its intended honoree.
This book has an introduction and 15 chapters divided into three sections: Part I, “Mounds and Middens”; Part II, “Methods and Materials Analyses”; and Part III, “Spanish Missions and Seminole Settlements.” The eclectic nature of the various chapters makes arranging their discussion around overarching themes or common subject areas difficult. As a result, my discussion in this review diverges from the structure of the book and is instead organized around what I see as the three primary goals of the respective chapters: (1) testing old hypotheses, (2) reevaluating the significance of well-known sites, and (3) synthesizing what we know about particular material categories and historical events.
In highlighting a series of Milanich's long-standing ideas, the chapters by Brent R. Weisman, by Michael Russo, and by Vernon J. Knight Jr. and John E. Worth all underscore his penchant for advancing hypotheses that continue to stimulate new research. In Chapter 1, Weisman examines Milanich's occupational nexus model to explain settlement patterns associated with the Woodland period (AD 100–600) Cades Pond culture in northcentral Florida. According to this model, as local populations grew, Cades Pond site clusters aggregated to form independent polities called nexuses, each of which was tethered to a specific wetland that supplied economically necessary aquatic resources. While noting the model's elegance and testability, Weisman relies on updated data to emphasize the significance of ponds as essential components of the Cades Pond ritual landscape, rather than just as sources of material necessities. In a similar vein, Russo scrutinizes the notion shared by Milanich and others that Woodland period ring-shaped shell middens served as year-round villages. Although he does not dismiss the hypothesis altogether, Russo is rightly skeptical because of the dearth of direct architectural evidence from midden sites and what he sees as questionable conclusions based on overgeneralizing miniscule zooarchaeological samples. Russo's chapter provides a useful blueprint for future researchers by detailing ethnographic analogs for what Woodland period houses may have looked like and suggesting specific material correlates. In their chapter, Knight and Worth rely primarily on refined radiocarbon chronologies to refute a hypothesized Cuban origin for incised Glades pottery in South Florida. Their results, demonstrating that Glades wares significantly predate their proposed Cuban counterparts, are corroborated by marked contrasts in both the agricultural complexes and technologies between the two regions.
A second set of chapters provide novel interpretations of iconic Florida archaeological sites directly or indirectly connected to Milanich's work. Karl T. Steinen's focus is the mound/pond complex at the well-known Fort Center site, located near Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida and thought to function from around AD 200 to 800. After describing the site's layout and major features, Steinen draws on ethnohistoric sources to make the case that construction of Fort Center constituted a ritual retelling of the Cherokee earth-diver myth. Cordell, in turn, revisits her previous investigations of Weeden Island pottery from the Late Woodland civic-ceremonial center at McKeithen, located in northern Florida and dating from AD 400 to 800. Using a greatly expanded set of compositional data, Cordell confirms a multicentered model of production for Weeden Island prestige and mortuary wares and clarifies the likely manufacturing origins of numerous pottery types, tempers, and paste groups. Chapters by Keith Ashley and the late Claudine Payne both explore questions related to Mississippian complexity in Florida. Payne outlines and contextualizes the evolution of chiefly power at the Mississippian mound center of Lake Jackson, located beside the lake of the same name near Tallahassee. She argues that Mississippian culture in the Apalachee region of northwestern Florida resulted from in-migration rather than gradual in-situ development. Ashley, in contrast, tries to make sense of the Grand Shell Ring on Big Talbot Island in northeastern Florida, the only Mississippian shell ring on the Atlantic Coast. Through detailed analysis of the ring's depositional history, which included ritualized middening and episodic feasting, Ashley contends that it was constructed to commemorate the ring-building traditions of the region's Archaic past. Finally, Jane-Anne Blakney-Bailey brings renewed attention to archaeological investigations during 2003 and 2004 at the Paynes Town Seminole site; they provide unique insights into the lives of early Seminoles, including the noted leader King Payne, during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
All the remaining chapters to some extent pay homage to Milanich's gift for synthesizing scattered archaeological data and interpretation into coherent, easily digestible narratives. Most are largely descriptive, providing informative summaries of the current state of knowledge regarding a given topic. Arlene Fradkin, for example, compiles 35 years of zooarchaeological data from precolumbian sites along the lower St. Johns River in northeastern Florida, which she then mines for clues regarding seasonality of occupation and trends in overall subsistence strategy. Similarly, Smith reviews evidence for the use of iron celts throughout the protohistoric Southeast, providing a valuable outline of the spatiotemporal distribution of different celt types. Robert J. Austin explores the use of nonchert stone resources in South Florida, which he argues have been inconsistently collected and underanalyzed. By applying Ian Hodder's notion of “entanglement” to such artifacts from Big Mound Key, he effectively illustrates the complex relationships of these tools to myriad other technologies and practices. Mitchem's chapter, in turn, brings together archaeological evidence related to a specific historical event, the sixteenth-century Spanish exploratory entrada led by Hernando de Soto. Comparing material evidence from two sites likely visited by the Soto expedition, Mitchem explains apparent differences as reflecting variability in the impacts of early Native North American contact with Spanish colonizers.
A few of the “synthesizing” chapters, however, go beyond description to make new inferences based on assembled data. Timothy A. Kohler's chapter is a curious inclusion in the volume given that it—as acknowledged by the author—reflects a decades-old understanding of public architecture in precolumbian North America. Nevertheless, Kohler uses thorough, albeit outdated, overviews of the historical development of monument construction across the US Southwest and Southeast to evaluate Bruce G. Trigger's view of monument building as a form of conspicuous consumption. The remaining two chapters by Worth and Rebecca Saunders both review the history of Catholic missionization in Florida but come to notably different conclusions. Worth perceives mission activity as a strategy of Spanish colonization that occurred in three phases. In his view, the most successful phase was initiated by the Franciscan friars, who implemented a mutually beneficial strategy combining the voluntary placement of missionaries within Native communities with a relatively secondary role for the Spanish military. Saunders, conversely, provides important context to understanding missions in Florida by referencing analogous strategies exercised by the Catholic Church in Europe, along with preexisting Mississippian political structures that influenced Native Floridians’ response to Spanish colonizers. Using the concepts of confrontation, accommodation, and legitimization, Saunders outlines an exploitive and sometimes violent history of missionization under the Franciscan friars that belies the relatively benign account presented by Worth and others.
To conclude, each of the volume's individual chapters unquestionably contributes to our understanding of Florida's cultural history, and several will have significant utility for archaeologists moving forward, either as a convenient topic-specific reference or as source material for spurring future research. Taken as a whole, however, it is easy to see how the book's lack of thematic coherence or consistency of approach may frustrate some readers.
Ultimately, however, if it is to be judged by the aims explicitly set forth by its editors, this book is an undeniably apt tribute to an archaeologist perhaps best known for the remarkable breadth of his contributions to Florida archaeology.
