Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P.Bullen Series – serie

Relying on previously unused documents, this is a history of the Timucua Indians of Florida, from the first contact with Europeans, to their exile in Cuba in 1763 and their final eradication. It examines their culture, language, political structures, and the meanings of their placenames and titles.

Chronicles the discovery and excavation of the only known campsite of Hernando de Soto's ten-state odyssey in La Florida in the 16th century. The book has three parts: historical background; archaeological excavations at the site; and a retranslation of the narratives relating to the winter camp.

Early European descriptions of North America tell about a landscape and a variety of cultures in northeast Florida--a region that had been occupied by native people for more than 10,000 years--that were unlike anything the explorers and settlers had ever encountered. This story of the land and people in that region of the St. Johns River and the Atlantic coast covers 18,000 years--from the Ice Age to the first half of the 20th century.James Miller describes how natural features transformed and how cultural traditions of native people, as well as Spanish, English, and American colonists, developed in response to opportunities and constraints of the environment. With an unusually broad scope in time, space, and subject matter, he uses the example of northeast Florida to explore the notion of environmental equilibrium, to illustrate the fallacy of a pristine environment, and to show how essential environmental history is to modern ecological planning.Fully illustrated with 25 photographs and 40 maps and written in an accessible style that synthesizes material usually accessible only to specialists, the book will appeal to general readers and policy planners as well as experts. No comparable environmental history of any Florida region exists.

Bringing together 19 Caribbean specialists, this text examines the people of the Caribbean, their social organization, religion, language, lifeways, and contribution to the culture of their modern descendants - to provide a comprehensive reader on Caribbean archaeology, ethnohistory, and ethnology.

With respect to the bog burial tradition, Florida is unique, producing one of the largest inventories of North American skeletal remains older than 6,000 years. Near Titusville, Florida, in 1984, excavations began at the Windover archaeological site, the New World's largest cemetery of this antiquity. This book is the first complete summary of the multiple investigations conducted there by archaeologists and specialists from across the nation and provides the first detailed overview of the population, and in particular the mortuary customs, from this Early Archaic era. The human remains uncovered at Windover are more numerous than at any site of its date and their preservation is truly phenomenal, making the site an unparalleled research opportunity. In addition to brain tissue, it houses the most complete inventory of organic artifacts that these early people manufactured and used, including a complex group of objects made from bone, antler, wood, and fabric seldom preserved in sites of this age and the largest collection of hand-woven materials from this period in the New World. With increasing controversy surrounding the disturbance of Native American human burial sites and legislation designed to restrict investigation of such places, Windover may be one of the last large, truly unique cemetery investigations and analyses that American archaeology will undertake.