"A Clash of Cultures" 'Millions of native people were ill-equipped for the onslaught of the mighty Spanish' by Brian Fagan in "Archaeology" (Jan-Feb 1990) The Day of Discovery looms just over the horizon--October 12, 1992, the Columbus Quincentenary. It was on that momentous day in the Bahamas five centuries ago that Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, first encountered Native Americans. "They are very well-built people, with handsome bodies and very fine faces, though their appearance is marred somewhat by very broad heads and foreheads. They are friendly and well- dispositioned people who bear no arms except for small spears, and they have no iron." Believing that he was on an island off China, Columbus called these exotic people Indios, or Indians. "I believe," he wrote, "that people from the mainland come here to take them as slaves." This first encounter with the islanders of Guanahani marked not only a watershed in European history, but the beginning of five centuries of constant, often traumatic, confrontation between Europeans and Native Americans that con- tinues to this day. By all accounts, the Quincentenary celebration is being planned on a massive scale. Entire nations and many heads of state will participate. We can expect a blizzard of rhetoric, and an avalanche of Columbus books, TV series, and flamboyant commemorations. Doubtless, fleets of replica caravels will sail from Old World to New. All this will make for a brilliant occasion that will dwarf the U.S. Bicentennial in sheer mag- nitude. But will the Quincentenary reflect historical reality, treat adequately and sensitively the Native American societies encountered by Columbus and his many successors? For all the anniversary's hype, scholarly initiatives, and fine words, millions of Native Americans will have little cause to celebrate this event. If their ancestors are remembered at all, it will probably be for their minor role in a predominantly Western drama. No question, the exploration and settlement of North America was a remarkable and complex chapter in world history. No question, either, that many compelling and larger-than-life people played the roles of heroes and villains in the story--the Admiral of the Ocean Sea is but the first of these remarkable individuals. However, the popular penchant for historical heroes, for thinking of history in terms of individuals and their deeds, is both myopic and simplistic in the extreme. The early exploration and colonization of North America brought Renaissance Europe in contact with an extraordinary diversity of Native American cultures, none of which had achieved the social, political, and economic sophistication of Western civilization. And what a diversity--everything from simple hunter-gatherer bands and big-game hunters, to coastal tribes subsisting on sea mammals and fish, to elaborate chiefdoms presiding over sizable territories. From the very beginning, an unbridgeable chasm separated the European and the Native American, a chasm not only of language but of incompatible cultural values and world views. Native American societies were based on notions of community, mutual obligation and reciprocity, and on close ties of kin. They were societies with complex religious beliefs, with symbolic world views that were radically different from those of Europeans. As such, they were ill-equipped to resist the onslaught of a highly individualistic, technologically superior civilization. Inevi- tably, they were exploited, decimated by exotic diseases, had their lands seized, and their traditional cultures transformed beyond recognition. The survivors became serfs and slaves, or at best a subordinate, often tangential, element in the new social order. From the very moment of Columbus's discovery, European scholars puzzled over the origin and diversity of Native American society. Their puzzlement was born both of intellectual curi- osity and of a need to establish the relationship between the Native American and the events of Biblical history, among them, the wanderings of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. Inevitably, too, the first romantic visions of the Native Americans were casualties of profound disillusionment. New visions emerged of primitiveness and savagery. And, as Europeans expanded into the interior and encountered resistance, the Native Americans were viewed as troublemakers and villains, the enemy of a remote, ever-changing frontier. Their centuries-long clash with ex- plorers, missionaries, and settlers created enduring stereotypes of Native Americans that not only translated into racist policies and attitudes, but caused the indigenous themselves to become footnotes of American history; the benighted assumption was that they had nothing to offer history. Reluctant as one is to admit it, the 12,000 years of North America's past prior to Columbus are still regarded as irrelevant to mainstream American history. Without question, this is because the vast majority of Americans have no direct cultural identification with Precolumbian North American societies. They perceive their roots as belonging in Europe and in European and recent North American history, not in prehistoric America. Many textbooks on American history devote but a few pages, if that, to prehistoric society. Those Native Americans who came in contact with early Europeans are usually treated as little more than primitive players in a game at which only Europeans excelled. They provided food and help, perhaps turned hostile, participated in massacres, and rebelled against the Word of God. There are also those who still argue that American history began with Columbus. They cast a passing nod in the general direction of the Vikings--Erik the Red and his bold voyagers who probably made landfall on the North American continent in the tenth century. As for earlier history, that's little more than what Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper of Oxford, in talking about Africa, once called "the aimless gyrations of native tribes." According to this argument, the unwritten history of Native Americans is not only irrelevant to modern Americans, it is not even worth studying for its sheer intellectual value. Those who argue this way, either explicitly or implicitly, are completely ignorant of the dramatic achievements of American archaeology during the past century. Confronted with the historical record of devastating cul- tural change and long-term discrimination and insensitivity, one certainly cannot blame Native Americans for wishing to ignore the Quincentenary. While it is, of course, ridiculous to blame twentieth-century Americans for the sins of their European ancestors, Native Americans are quite justified in being incensed by the historical myopia and narrow cultural perspectives that beset current interpretations of the Day of Discovery, as well as the centuries that followed. There is an urgent need for a more objective, more balanced perspective of the complex social and political developments that followed October 12, 1492. The word "development" is appropriate, for a new generation of archaeologists and historians is redefining the European exploration of North America in entirely new terms--terms of cultural change and long-range consequences. Archaeology's greatest strength is that it offers a unique way of studying long-term change in human societies over vast periods of time-- in the case of North American for more than 12,000 years. Unfortunately, it is only recently that archaeologists have undertaken such studies in the context of the European Contact Period. In the past, archaeologists tended to think somewhat rigidly of European contact as the ending point of prehistory, when Native American society came into the orbit of Western civiliza- tion. We tended to have a preoccupation not with processes of cultural change, but with the classification of the past into discrete periods--Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Woodland, and so on. We would talk, for example, of Paleo-Indian societies in the Eastern Woodland of North America, and assert that big-game hinting cultures were followed by more diverse Archaic cultures after 8000 B.C. What was often forgotten was that Paleo-Indian evolved into Archaic, with a seamless continuity of human culture. In fact, the continuity may have been more important than the change. In short, our classifications have tended to become fixed in archaeological stone, with prehistory ending with the phenomenon "European contact," the point when Native American society, whether in California, Mexico, or Bolivia, became what has often been called the "Ethnographic Present." Now archaeologists and historians are taking a closer look at the phenomenon of European contact as a part of long-term cultural developments in Native American society. These new, multidisciplinary studies are based on two important assumptions. First, that when two cultures, however different, come into direct or indirect contact, both undergo change. Second, that European contact in its many forms was not an endpoint. Native American societies had been changing for thousands of years, and these processes of change continued, albeit with new elements added. long after the first encounters with Europeans. It is these intricate processes of cultural change that archaeology can study better than any other dis- cipline, largely because the material remains that it unearths offer an objective, dispassionate view of human behavior during the centuries of European contact. Fundamentally, the new researchers are concerned with three important questions: what was American society like immediately before European contact, what was the precise nature of this contact, and what were the long-term consequences to both European and Native American society? The University of Florida and the Florida Museum of National History, both at Gainesville, are major centers for a new genera- tion of archaeological researchers. Kathleen Deagan, Jerald Milanich, Marvin Smith, and other scholars are developing new and highly sophisticated research projects that draw not only on historical and ethnographic sources, but also on information from dozens of other scientific disciplines. Their efforts have, for example, thrown new light on Hernando de Soto's calamitous journey through the Southeast, as well as on the life-styles of the indigenous peoples through whose territory he passed. De Soto marched far inland in search of gold and silver. He encountered a land of flourishing and often complex chiefdoms with high levels of military organization, people ruled by a powerful elite, their lives governed by complex religious beliefs and elaborate rituals. Among the polities he visited was Coosa, a powerful sixteenth-century chiefdom. The U.S. De Soto Commis- sion of 1939 placed prehistoric Coosa on the Coosa River in what is today central Alabama. Charles Hudson, Marvin Smith, and a team of archaeologists have combined archaeological and histor- ical data to show that Coosa was in fact centered on the upper Coosawattee River in what is now northwestern Georgia. The Coosa chief lived at what is now known as the Little Egypt site, where two mounds and a central plaza formed the core of a series of communities surrounded by maize fields. Researchers have not only been able to identify Coosa, but also the distinct ar- chaeological phases that coincide with the political subdivisions of the chiefdom that are described in Spanish historical records. In another far-reaching endeavor, Ann Ramenofsky and other scholars are using settlement data from archaeological surveys, combined with judicious use of historical records, to track catastrophic population declines resulting from both direct and indirect European contact. They suspect that the processes of depopulation may have been so rapid and devastating that an- cestral traditions and much of the indigenous culture may have been swept away in a few short months. The loss, in particular, of religious and genealogical lore would have been especially devastating to a traditional society, leading to the fragmenta- tion of hitherto powerful chiefdoms into much smaller, less centralized societies. In may be possible, one day, to chronicle population movements from distributions of archaeological sites and through studies of mass graves dating from epidemics. Marvin Smith has used settlement patterns and recovered European artifacts to study sites in the Georgia and Alabama piedmont. He has found that from 1525 to 1565, European items received in trade served as prestigious objects and were often buried with the Native American elite. After 1600, the pattern changed as the elite lost power and European goods became more commonplace, serving a more utilitarian purpose. Traditional styles of shell beads and gorgets were replaced by brass and glass equivalents; ground-stone axes gave way to iron tools. Only native pottery remained unchanged. Time and time again, the archaeologist offers a minute portrait, not necessarily of the grand events of the post- Columbian era, but of small changes and telling adjustments. Nowhere are these perspectives more exciting than in La Florida, the Hispanic Southeast. Calvin Jones, for example, discovered De Soto's winter encampment beneath downtown Tallahassee, and excavations there have revealed many details of the Spaniards' first winter in North America. Kathleen Deagan has uncovered both sixteenth- and eighteenth-century St. Augustine, a tiny settlement founded in 1565 on a strategic inlet overlooking the treasure-ship route up the Gulf Stream. By 1600, about 425 people living in 120 households dwelt in the town. They lived in thatched houses laid out in blocks on a rigid master plan pre- scribed by distant government decree. The excavations have revealed a highly structures, conservative settlement where "Spanishness" was valued, an adaptive strategy to survive within the colonial system. But at the domestic level, the Spanish material culture was being modified, for inter-marriage appears to have introduced new foods and domestic artifacts into many households. In the case of St. Augustine and other La Florida settlements, historical records reveal little of the complex interactions between Spanish and Native American neighbors. Just as fascinating are the revelations the St. Augustine excavations have provided concerning the lives of African slaves in La Florida. Jane Landers, a historian at the University of Florida, has recently reminded us that African labor played an important role in early colonization, for indigenous populations were soon decimated, and there was not enough European manpower. By 1534, Africans, imported to replace native workers, outnum- bered Europeans on Puerto Rico. In St. Augustine, historical records tell us, slaves hunted, trapped, fished, and labored on churches and other public buildings. They were a critical component in the economic structure of La Florida. By 1738, Spanish Governor Manuel de Montiano had established Gracia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose, a free African-American community, about two miles north of St. Augustine. Mose flourished until 1763, when the British took over La Florida, and its inhabitants, with other members of the local community, withdrew to Cuba. Mose at one point consisted of a walled fort, a large church, a priest's house, and 22 thatched houses. Kathleen Deagan and her col- leagues have uncovered the foundations of the town fort and its moat, along with several interior structures. as excavations continue, the team hopes to use artifacts found in the settlement to study the cultural patterns at Mose, and to learn something of the way English, African, Native American, and Spanish culture interacted in the multiethnic world of La Florida. Again, archaeology shows us that it is a great mistake to look at the early European presence in the Americas in ethnocentric terms. From the very beginning, the settler population was highly diverse, a comingling of many indigenous and international biological and cultural strands. Not that the settler population was a large one. Even the Catholic presence was minimal at first. iN 1584, only four Franciscan friars served the spiritual needs of all of La Florida. Half a century later, as many as 70 missionaries ministered to approximately 25,000 indians in a chain of missions throughout the province. Unlike Californian and southwestern missions, these were humble structures often constructed of mud and sticks, easily set afire or blown over by hurricanes. Hardly any remains of these missions survive, so mission archaeology assumes particular importance in the Southeast. David Hurst Thomas of the American Museum of Natural History has located and excavated Mission Santa Catalina de Guale on St. Catherine's Island off the Georgia coast. The original mission was burned down in 1597, its successor being a square, fortified compound with church, friary, garrison, and central plaza. By using sophisticated remote-sensing methods and selective excavation, Thomas has not only located and dug the main structures, but has also developed a wealth of basic data about such sites for use in future investigations elsewhere. All these, and many other, promising endeavors are still in their infancy, but they show that our perceptions of the Day of Discovery and its consequences have been, until now, far too simplistic. Native Americans may have no cause for celebrating the Quincentenary, but at least there are signs there will be one lasting legacy of this frenzied event--a new concern with de- veloping a more balanced perspective of the European Contact Period. And in this process, archaeology has a leading role to play. FAGAN-01.ART