Inclusion, Transformation, and Humility in North American Archaeology: Essays and Other “Great Stuff” Inspired by Kent G. Lightfoot

By Seth Mallios

In a dynamic near half-century career of insight, engagement, and instruction, Kent G. Lightfoot transformed North American archaeology through his innovative ideas, robust collaborations, thoughtful field projects, and mentoring of numerous students. Authors emphasize the multifarious ways Lightfoot impacted—and continues to impact—approaches to archaeological inquiry, anthropological engagement, Indigenous issues, and professionalism. Four primary themes include: negotiations of intercultural entanglements in pluralistic settings; transformations of temporal and spatial archaeological dimensions, as well as theoretical and methodological innovations; engagement with contemporary people and issues; and leading by example with honor, humor, and humility. These reflect the remarkable depth, breadth, and growth in Lightfoot’s career, despite his unwavering stylistic devotion to Hawaiian shirts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Release date: Jan 6, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805392538

Book preview

Introduction

Lynne Goldstein and Seth Mallios

The contributions to this volume are extraordinary—each is in one or more ways focused on transformation. Transformation of past communities via resilience and persistence, transformation of archaeology in terms of methodology and practice, and transformation of interactions between archaeologists and Indigenous communities and other collaborators. While transformation and moving archaeology forward is a common thread, so is each author’s relationship to Kent G. Lightfoot.

In a dynamic, nearly half-century career of insight, fieldwork, engagement, and instruction, Kent Lightfoot has transformed North American archaeology through his innovative ideas, robust collaborations, thoughtful field projects, and mentoring of numerous students. This volume consists of chapters by archaeologists profoundly influenced by Lightfoot. The collected works emphasize multifarious ways he has impacted—and continues to impact—archaeological inquiry, anthropological engagement, Indigenous issues, and professionalism. The chapters are highly varied but intersect with four primary themes: 1) archaeologies of resilience and persistence; 2) theoretical and methodological innovations in archaeology; 3) engagement with contemporary people and issues; and 4) leading by example with honor, humor, and humility. These ideas and the directions in which the authors pursue their projects form an inextricable part of Lightfoot’s legacy. They reflect the remarkable depth, breadth, and growth in Kent’s career, despite his unwavering and static stylistic devotion to Hawaiian shirts.

In addition to the four primary themes, each chapter, directly or indirectly, points out the significance—personally, as well as for archaeology—of the so-called Lightfoot Holy Trinity: holistic, diachronic, and broadly comparative. As Lee Panich notes, these concepts offered a succinct tripartite guiding principle for the study of Indigenous-colonial interactions. More broadly, they represent excellent advice for any kind of archaeological research. Each essay that engages these employs a unique perspective and uses different data, and the combinations are both enlightening and important.

Presenting the four themes of this book as independent is deceptive. It is worth emphasizing the extensive overlap between the different sections of this volume. In fact, Lightfoot’s explicit efforts in breaking down barriers between archaeological subdisciplines, anthropological paradigms, and project stakeholders are anathema to any rigid structure that separates, limits, or singularizes the contributions of the individual authors.

While the contributors to this book have identified, explained, and celebrated many of Lightfoot’s important contributions to American archaeology, it is precisely the breadth, depth, and diversity of their archaeological insights that emphasize an understated but equally poignant impact. Archaeology is often at its most insightful, honest, and significant when its practitioners are able to wander from predetermined expectations or intentions.

Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in Ecce Homo:

To become what one is, one must not have the faintest notion of what one is. From this point of view even the blunders of life have their own meaning and value—the occasional side and wrong roads, the delays, modesties, seriousness wasted on tasks removed from the task. (italics original, Nietzsche and Large 2007: 254)

Lightfoot, undoubtedly preferring to invoke Rodney Dangerfield over Nietzsche, would be the first to proclaim that he has not the faintest notion of what he is to archaeology and is quick to entertain his audience with self-deprecating tales of such blunders, wrong roads, delays, and other modesties. And yet, the work presented here reveals a deeper truth: that the rich archaeological canvas that is Lightfoot’s legacy—well-established by his numerous projects, grants, books, articles, collaborations, classes, community engagements, and more—also includes bold brushstrokes by the numerous students and peers he has influenced, with many more yet to come.

Lynne Goldstein has known Kent Lightfoot and his wife and partner Roberta Jewett for about thirty-five years. She relates from personal experience:

When I decided to take on the project of excavating the historical cemetery at Fort Ross, Kent was extremely supportive of my proposal to California Parks, the Native American Heritage Commission, Alaska Natives, California Natives, and the Russian Orthodox Church, and introduced me to many of the key players. Sannie Osborn, a graduate student of mine at the time, wanted to conduct her dissertation research on historical Russian cemetery materials, and a Russian historian suggested that the cemetery at Fort Ross needed to have its location verified and should also be excavated. For reasons not relevant here, it took three years to complete the excavations, and our very complicated permission permit required that I had to be physically present on site at all times. My field school and crew shared the archy camp with Kent’s field school—running the two projects simultaneously was a lot of fun and allowed students to expand the scope of what they learned, as well as to begin to understand yet a different type of critical data.

Fort Ross required me (often accompanied by my late husband Jonathan Schneider) to travel to California several times each year, often staying with Kent and Roberta. The pattern included taking a day off to explore and have fun, an example of Lightfoot self-care. Our practice was to visit someplace that none of us had ever visited previously. Since we had all spent considerable time in the region, this practice became an increasingly difficult task. We visited the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, various historical houses, train museums, the Jelly Belly factory, and more. I had heard that the museum at the San Quentin prison had interesting exhibits, so we decided to visit. The first time we tried to go there, they would not let us in because it was the end of a shift and the guards were changing. The next time, it was family visiting day, and we would have to be strip-searched if we wanted to enter. The final time there was some other reason that we could not enter. Indeed, we are likely the only people who could not make it INTO San Quentin. We still had a wonderful time, and never let a change in plans minimize our fun.

Kent Lightfoot embraces change and has repeatedly forged innovative paths for his projects, community partners, and students, regardless of unforeseen obstacles. At the same time, he also displays remarkable continuity. The chapters in this volume attest to his consistency in research quality, mentoring style, and overall personality. They demonstrate the significance and broad application of Lightfoot’s original ideas and musings, the richness and diversity of data sets available to us, and the power of such approaches to decolonizing archaeological research. They also reveal that he is an extraordinary archaeologist, teacher, and colleague. Kent has helped to transform archaeology in a number of meaningful and significant ways, and he has had profound impacts on his students, collaborators, and colleagues.

Lynne Goldstein is Professor of Anthropology at Michigan State University, where she has been since 1996. She previously worked at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the majority of her research has focused on Wisconsin and the Great Lakes region. Goldstein has served as editor of American Antiquity and publications director for the Archaeology Division of the American Anthropological Association. She earned her BA in Anthropology from Beloit College in 1971, and her PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University in 1976. Goldstein has authored numerous publications on archaeological topics and continues to serve on various national advisory committees on behalf of archaeology.

Seth Mallios is Professor of Anthropology, University History Curator, and Director of the South Coastal Information Center at San Diego State University. He received his BA from the University of California, Berkeley (1993) and his PhD from the University of Virginia (1998). As an anthropological historical archaeologist, Dr. Mallios engages in scientific and humanistic community-based research with goals of offering insights and facilitating understandings into past and present issues of identity, memory, and myth-making. Professor Mallios directs multiple active field projects in Southern California, has published thirteen books, and has curated a diverse array of public exhibits.

References

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, and Duncan Large. 2007. Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cartoon drawing of a smiling Kent Lightfoot standing with arms outspread, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, glasses, dark pants, and baseball hat with neck flap. In a speech bubble the cartoon character says, “Don’t worry; even I sometimes feel stuck between archaeologists getting off on the wrong foot or going off on the Lightfoot!” The cartoonists signed the illustration in cursive with “Sethro” and the date of 8/16/22.

Figure P1.1. Cartoon of Kent Lightfoot saying, Don’t worry; even I sometimes feel stuck between archaeologists getting off on the wrong foot or going off on the Lightfoot! Courtesy of Seth Mallios.

PART I

Archaeologies of Resilience and Persistence

The first part of this volume focuses primarily on archaeological investigations of resilience and persistence in pluralistic settings. It includes contributions by Elliot H. Blair, Glenn J. Farris, Seth Mallios, Lee M. Panich, and Thomas A. Wake.

Elliot Blair, one of Lightfoot’s more recent PhD students, evaluates the utility of neighborhood archaeology as a unit of analysis for examining aggregated pluralistic communities formed on St. Catherines Island (Georgia) during the late seventeenth century and shows how complex patterns of Indigenous population relocation resulted in diverse social networks. He demonstrates how Lightfoot’s neighborhood models from Fort Ross are well-suited for studying the chiefdoms of the Mississippian Southeast and uses this as a springboard to examine the complex interlocking of multiple identity categories, and grounds his findings in multiple lines of evidence.

Glenn Farris, a long-term collaborator of Lightfoot’s since the 1980s, examines CA-SON-174, an Indigenous Kashaya village at Fort Ross along the Sonoma Coast in northern California. He coordinates the perspectives of previous archaeology, more recent archaeology, ethnography, and historical resources. The time period under examination is one of significant transition, and Farris demonstrates that the site interpretation is much richer by applying multiple lines of evidence. The physical location of the settlement does not fit with traditional Kashaya practices, but Farris shows how the location corresponds with the circumstances of the time. The chapter begins to address some of the changes that coincided with the departure of the Russians. Farris’s use of historical anthropology mirrors Lightfoot’s work at Colony Ross and is essential in appreciating nuances in Native settlement patterns and strategies.

Seth Mallios’s investigation of the Nathan Harrison site atop Palomar Mountain in rural San Diego County uses recent archaeological finds to discuss identity, survival strategies, and mythmaking in the Old West. As one of Lightfoot’s undergraduate advisees from the 1990s and a long-time colleague, he invokes Lightfoot’s use of paradigmatic pluralism and confluent anthropological, archaeological, and historical insights to reveal how the physical properties of the Harrison cabin and the surrounding landscape were central to a strategic and well-disguised public minstrelsy performance by the region’s first African-American homesteader. The Nathan Harrison project is a perfect example of a site that would, at best, be confusing if interpreted and approached traditionally. Mallios’s long-term project at the site discovered Harrison’s cabin, a patio, a midden, an orchard, and an arrastra. In analyzing the cabin, Mallios found that it was built very precisely and represented an expression of Harrison’s identity. Harrison used the design of slave quarters in the Antebellum South, employed local materials and techniques from other local groups, then located the cabin on the most defensible space in the county so he could flee to safety if necessary. Harrison carried cultural traditions with him yet reinvented them in a personal way with each decision, each experience, and each role he deliberately performed.

Lee Panich, one of Lightfoot’s more recent PhD graduates, uses the Lightfoot ideal of a holistic, diachronic, and broadly comparative approach to archaeology to guide his analyses of Indigenous persistence in historically missionized regions of Alta and Baja California, focusing on the Ohlone of the San Francisco Bay Area and the Paipai of northern Baja California. He offers an overview of how Lightfoot and his students position archaeology within historical anthropology yet simultaneously address troubled colonial legacies of California archaeology and its practitioners. Panich’s focus is on how Lightfoot’s trinity can provide a richer interpretation of colonial California. Among other things, Lightfoot and his students have been at the forefront of rethinking how to incorporate low-impact archaeological methods into collaborative research projects. Lightfoot also developed a range of practices that span artificial temporal divides and move away from separating prehistory from the historical period; he emphasized that one must understand where people came from to understand why they do what they do. Kent’s work more recently has focused less on early colonial issues, and more on how Indigenous people have managed (and sometimes thrived) subsequent to the initial colonial period. Panich situates Lightfoot’s work as well as the work of his many students, all of whom are doing historical anthropology or related endeavors, and many of whom regularly work directly with Indigenous people, to confront the troubled history of anthropology. Panich calls this approach the undisciplining of anthropology. It is a question of doing the work rather than just talking about it.

Thomas Wake, one of Lightfoot’s first UC Berkeley PhD graduates from the early 1990s, examines how animal remains from archaeological sites can identify the persistence of cultural identities, hierarchical social distinctions, and traditional foodways, using examples from different neighborhoods at Colony Ross. Wake’s chapter differs from others because he focuses on animal bones and the kind of information they can provide—past environments, hunting patterns, subsistence, butchery, domestication, personal and group food choices, social status, and cultural affiliation. Wake’s dissertation research focused on Colony Ross and the surrounding regions, and he notes that Lightfoot and his students have subsequently maintained a focus on foodways—examining the persistence of cultural identity and traditional foodways in the face of colonization. Wake, using his own research as well as that of many others, demonstrates that California is particularly well suited to the zooarchaeological study of colonialism.

Each of the chapters in Part I examines historical intercultural entanglements in pluralistic settings. Nevertheless, it is the diversity of archaeological approaches and insights employed in these chapters that truly reflects Lightfoot’s far-reaching influence and myriad ways of applying Kent.

CHAPTER 1

Neighborhood Archaeology at Seventeenth-Century Mission Santa Catalina de Guale

Elliot H. Blair

Introduction

Kent Lightfoot’s research at Colony Ross is an iconic and superlative example of the archaeology of colonialism in North America (e.g., Lightfoot 1995, 2005; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018a, 2018b; Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998; Lightfoot, Schiff, and Wake 1997; Lightfoot, Wake, and Schiff 1991). As a new graduate student in 2008, studying under Kent’s direction at the University of California, Berkeley, I immediately knew that I wanted to adopt his theoretical and methodological innovations to my own dissertation work at the colonial site of Santa Catalina de Guale, a seventeenth-century Spanish mission located on St. Catherines Island, Georgia. I was specifically attracted to Kent’s sophisticated use of practice theory (e.g., Lightfoot, Martinez, and Schiff 1998), which he integrated with a focus on spatial organization (Lightfoot 1995). Together, these perspectives allowed him to parse and interrogate intracommunity patterning and interaction in pluralistic colonial societies (Lightfoot and Martinez 1995). Specifically, at Colony Ross, Kent was able to identify and compare practices at several, spatially distinct, ethnic neighborhoods: the Native Alaskan Neighborhood, the Russian Village, and multiple sites within the Native Californian Neighborhood.

Here, I discuss my efforts towards adopting The Lightfoot Approach for the method and theory of colonial archaeology to Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. I specifically discuss three challenges to following this framework on the Georgia coast:

1. Can an investigation of an archaeology of pluralism be adopted to the American Southeast, within the context of missionized Mississippian chiefdoms?

2. Is the neighborhood framework used by Kent at Fort Ross theoretically appropriate for a seventeenth-century Guale mission, and if so, how can neighborhoods be identified in this context?

3. And finally, how can a comparative archaeology of pluralism be enacted within a context that has largely been glossed as single ethnicity?

Following a brief discussion on the history and archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, I address each of these questions in the rest of this chapter.

Mission Santa Catalina de Guale

Following early Spanish colonial encounters along the Georgia and north Florida coast in the 1560s, 70s, and 80s, Mission Santa Catalina de Guale was initially established in 1595, destroyed during the 1597 Guale rebellion, and re-established in 1605, where, at its location on St. Catherines Island, Georgia, it remained the principle doctrina of the Spanish mission province of Guale until 1680 (Figure 1.1).

Map of the Mission Santa Catalina de Guale quadrangle. The directional compass is aligned with “mission north” so points at the northeast. A large square in the center, measuring at approximately 75 by 70 meters, encircles the church, cemetery, and atrio (atrium) to the south, a cocina (kitchen) and late well in the northern corner, a plaza in the center, and an early well and a late and early convento (convent) to the northeast. The church and cemetery are differentiated by shading and measures 20 by 10 meters. The atrio is also shaded with multiple small, curved lines and measures 15 by 15 meters. The cocina is 5 meters by 5 meters, the late well is 5 meters in diameter, the early well is two and a half feet in diameter. The early convento measures at 20 meters by 10 meters and the late convento sits within the same space as the early convento. Attached to the central square to the west is the western bastion. Outside of the central square are structures 6, measuring at 35 by 17 meters, and 1W, measuring at 17.5 by 5 meters, to the southwest and structure 5, measuring at 10 meters by 7 meters, to the northwest. The entire area is approximately 120 by 110 meters and includes a scale with 0-, 5-, 10-, and 15-meter sections.f Gaule missions of La Florida (approximately 270 kilometers on the Northern Florida coast) from the middle 1600s to the early 1700s. The northern most area is the Gaule Province which dates from the mid-1600s to 1684 and is made up of San Diego de Satuache, Santa Clara de Tupiqui, Santa Catalina de Guale, San Diego II, San Joseph de Sapala, Santa Clara II, Santa Catalina II, and San Diego III. The middle coastal area that dates from 1670-1702 is the Mocama Province and is comprised of San Phelipe II, Santa Clara III, San Phelipe III, Santa Catalina III, San Diego IV ,and San Joseph II. The Aqua Salada Province in the south includes St. Augustine and is not dated.

Figure 1.1. Guale missions in Atlantic La Florida. Courtesy of Elliot H. Blair.

The site of the mission was definitively established by David Hurst Thomas and his research team from the American Museum of Natural History in the early 1980s. Thomas and his team were able to locate and then excavate the seventeenth-century mission church and cemetery, the friary and mission kitchen, two wells, and several additional outlying mission period structures. However, despite the intensive work on the mission quadrangle, we know far less about the layout of the residential pueblo where the Guale neophytes resided. (Figure 1.2).

Map of the Mission Santa Catalina de Guale quadrangle. The directional compass is aligned with “mission north” so points at the northeast. A large square in the center, measuring at approximately 75 by 70 meters, encircles the church, cemetery, and atrio (atrium) to the south, a cocina (kitchen) and late well in the northern corner, a plaza in the center, and an early well and a late and early convento (convent) to the northeast. The church and cemetery are differentiated by shading and measures 20 by 10 meters. The atrio is also shaded with multiple small, curved lines and measures 15 by 15 meters. The cocina is 5 meters by 5 meters, the late well is 5 meters in diameter, the early well is two and a half feet in diameter. The early convento measures at 20 meters by 10 meters and the late convento sits within the same space as the early convento. Attached to the central square to the west is the western bastion. Outside of the central square are structures 6, measuring at 35 by 17 meters, and 1W, measuring at 17.5 by 5 meters, to the southwest and structure 5, measuring at 10 meters by 7 meters, to the northwest. The entire area is approximately 120 by 110 meters and includes a scale with 0-, 5-, 10-, and 15-meter sections.

Figure 1.2. Map of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale quadrangle, oriented along the mission grid system, with mission north at the top of the page (Blair 2013: 378, Figure 14.2), reproduced courtesy of the Division of Anthropology, American Museum of Natural History.

Pluralism at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale

One of the fundamental assertions that has often been made to differentiate the mission enterprises of Florida from those elsewhere in the Spanish borderlands, was that the Native peoples of the region—as members of sedentary agricultural chiefdoms—did not undergo the difficult, traumatic, and disruptive processes of reducción and congregación that occurred elsewhere, such as in Texas and Alta California (Blair 2018).

For example, Hann (1986: 371–72) has argued that formal policies of reducción did not occur in La Florida, with the sedentary agricultural communities of the region not requiring population relocation in order to facilitate conversion. He suggested that when relocation was required, later in the mission era, it was at the instigation of secular rather than religious authorities. Hann wrote: "As far as is known, Florida’s friars did not follow a policy of forceful reduction or congregación in establishing their first missions among Timucua-speakers. . . . The only phenomenon resembling congregación involved migrants from the hinterland who came to coastal villages so that they might become Christians. But this was a spontaneous voluntary phenomenon, distinct from the more or less coerced migrations that constituted congregación in places such as California" (Hann 1996: 168).

This position, while reflecting the realities of initial strategies of missionization that were largely structured by Indigenous political economies, does not acknowledge the largely traumatic and disruptive processes that emerged out of long-term colonial engagements (Lightfoot, Panich et al. 2013; Worth 2002: 50–53). More recently, scholars have acknowledged the existence of reducción in La Florida, though often with caveats. For example, Saunders (1998: 405) has noted that reducción was not systematically implemented, and Milanich (2006: 111) considered reduction to have occurred only as an outcome of population loss, with consolidation occurring as communities succumbed to disease. Deagan (1993: 89) observed that reducción policies were employed only under circumstances of population decline and social upheaval, such as that seen in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Florida. Regardless of these caveats about motives, timing, and the responsibility for instigating reductions, there is ample documentary evidence that relocation and aggregation were extensive and continual processes in Spanish Florida (Worth 1995, 1998, 2004, 2007, 2009a, 2009b).

For example, in 1659 a group of exiled Erie Indians (also referred to as Richehecrians, Chichemecos, and ultimately the Westo) immigrated to Georgia (Bowne 2000, 2005; Gallay 2003; Oatis 2004; Smith 1987: 132–34; 2002). The group, in conjunction with British slave traders, carried out a series of destructive raids against the coastal Spanish missions. This included a 1662 attack on the town of Huyache on the northern frontier of the Spanish Mission province of Guale (Bowne 2005: 78; Worth 2007: 19). This attack, though only briefly mentioned in the documentary record, was a transformative event in the province of Guale and precipitated the relocation of the northernmost Spanish mission—San Diego de Satuache—from the vicinity of the mouth of the Ogeechee River to St. Catherines Island, where it aggregated with Mission Santa Catalina de Guale sometime between 1663 and 1666 (Worth 1995: 190–91).

The Guale people encountered by the Spanish have generally been considered to have comprised a complex chiefdom, consisting of roughly fifty communities organized with two tiers of political organization above the community level. While there has been debate over the boundaries, membership, and organization of the Guale chiefdom, most researchers agree that it can be subdivided into between three and six constituent local chiefdoms and most likely included the barrier islands and adjacent mainland from the Altamaha to the Ogeechee rivers (Jones 1978a; Saunders 2000a; Worth 2003, 2004). The Guale were most likely a Muskhogean-speaking group (Broadwell 1991; Sturtevant 1994), who manufactured the Irene and Altamaha variants of the grit-tempered, stamped, and incised, Lamar pottery tradition (Braley 1990; Deagan and Thomas 2009; Hally 1994; Williams and Shapiro 1990). To the north of Guale, in the vicinity of Port Royal and Santa Elena was the province of Orista/Escamacu (Santa Elena), another Muskhogean-speaking chiefdom (also manufacturing Irene series ceramics) (Worth 2009a). While Jones (1978a) grouped Guale and Orista/Escamacu together into a unified sociopolitical unit, archaeological and documentary evidence suggest that the two provinces were actually separated by an uninhabited region around the Savannah River (Anderson 1994).

To the south, the province of Mocama has generally been understood to be a simple chiefdom, speaking a Timucuan dialect (Granberry 1990, 1993; Milanich 2004) and manufacturing clay-tempered San Pedro wares (Ashley 2008, 2009; Ashley and Rolland 1997), while the people living in the vicinity of St. Augustine spoke a different Timucuan dialect (Agua Salada) and manufactured sponge spiculate-tempered St. Johns ware (Deagan 2009).

This brief, and highly normative, gloss of the social geography of the Southeastern Atlantic coast, presents a picture where, at contact, language, chiefdom, province, and ceramic tradition largely co-varied. This picture is certainly too simple and corresponds to what Worth (2012) has described and criticized as an enhanced culture-historical framework that has dominated Southeastern archaeology. But because of the dominance of this framework, archaeological examinations of the complex sequence of population relocations described above, have tended to focus only on interactions and disruptions that crossed provincial, linguistic, and ceramic-type boundaries. For example, with the enhanced culture-historical framework Worth (2012) describes the aggregation of Satuache and Santa Catalina would be considered a non-event due to the shared language, political affiliation, and ceramic traditions of the two communities.

Although it seems intuitive that this complex sequence of population movements, relocations, and aggregations should have significant implications for internal community solidarity and integration, during the seventeenth century the Spanish argued that the social effects of such population aggregation were negligible. Indeed, in 1617, in response to significant population loss in the Timucuan administrative province, several Franciscan friars petitioned the king, writing:

We request that Your Majesty would be served to command that, whenever these necessities occur, as long as the governors are advised by the [Franciscan] prelate, these disordered [settlements] should be drawn together since there is not one inconvenience, through those that have to join together not being from different families or languages, but rather friends of friends, brothers of brothers, and relatives of relatives beforehand. (Stojanowski 2005: 40, citing Pareja et al. 1617; Worth 1998: 28, emphasis added)

Indeed, such arguments, combined with the seeming linguistic and ceramic homogeneity found within the province of Guale, have generally led scholars to presuppose a more-or-less cohesive Guale identity or ethnicity, and thus largely ignore the social effects of intra-province aggregation. In contrast, Rebecca Saunders (2001: 82–83) has noted that the primary allegiance and identity of the Guale . . . was with the village that served as the chief’s residence and area ceremonial center . . . [and] it is still unclear from the documents the extent to which the historic Guale considered themselves a coherent group. [The Guale] . . . seemed to have maintained more allegiance to a town . . . than to any larger group.

Close consideration of the historical evidence supports Saunders’s assertation. For example, on December 20, 1677, Captain Antonio de Argüelles, on the orders of the Governor of La Florida Pablo de Hita Salazar, arrived in the place of Santa Catalina on St. Catherines Island, Georgia in order to initiate an official visitation. The following day Argüelles organized a meeting of the Guale community leaders residing on St. Catherines Island—"the caciques, heirs, mandadores, and the rest of the leading men (principales)—in order to discuss governmental issues and concerns of members of the mission community. During this meeting the leaders of the place of Satuache advised Argüelles (via his interpreter, Diego Camuñas) that the cacique of Faslica had died and that a woman named Lucia was his rightful heir and should be appointed cacica. After discussion, however, Lucia declined the position and requested that her sister Elena—currently residing at San Phelipe de Atuluteca (located on the northern end of Cumberland Island, Georgia)—receive the office and title instead. Argüelles granted this request (Hann 1993: 89). During this same visit the caciques also complained to Argüelles that the Indians of this place were passing from one Council House (Bujio) to another with slight cause (Hann 1993: 89; Pearson 1975; Worth 1995: 30). In response, Argüelles ordered that they should remain in their own state (estado) and that this [rule] be observed" (Hann 1993: 89).

While somewhat ambiguous and lacking in detail, the discussions that occurred during this visitation illustrate two key points. First, the reference to the the place of Satuache highlights what Worth (2002) has extensively described as the persistence of chiefly matrilineages and community-level identities even within the context of aggregation and colonial entanglements. At the same time, the complaint that "Indians of this place were passing from one Council House (Bujio) to another with slight cause" reinforces this observation and complicates it. Worth (1995: 30) has suggested that this passage might be interpreted as indicating that the Santa Catalina and Satuache communities were reifying their distinctive identities architecturally through the construction of separate council houses within the same town, while simultaneously dealing with the conflict and social unrest precipitated by aggregation (cf. Moore and Jefferies 2014; Pearson 1975).

The importance of social identities internal to the Guale chiefdom is also evident in the documentary evidence from the 1597 Guale revolt. In 1597 the Spanish province of Guale erupted in armed insurrection, killing five of the six friars stationed in the province and razing most of the mission doctrinas that had been established along the coast. Most accounts of the rebellion (e.g., Gannon 1965; Geiger 1937; Hoffman 2002; Johnson 1923; Lanning 1935), based almost entirely upon the ca. 1619 non-eyewitness account of the Franciscan friar Luís Geronimo de Oré (1936), argue that the rebellion was instigated by the heir to the title of mico mayor (paramount chief) of Tolomato (the principal town within the chiefdom of Guale) named don Juanillo. The commonly accepted explanation for the revolt was that the Franciscan friars provoked the attack by attempting to end polygamous practices and by trying to subvert don Juanillo’s right to inherit the title of mico mayor from his uncle don Francisco, the current mico mayor of Tolomato (Jones 1978a; Pearsall 2013; Stojanowski and Duncan 2008).

More recently, however, Francis and Kole (2011; see also Kole 2009) revisited the primary documentary record of this event and reinterpreted the revolt, arguing that it was more about factional competition among Guale elites than active resistance against Spanish colonial powers; in their words it was a a story of intense competition, fierce rivalries, and power struggles between various southeastern chiefdoms. What unfolds is a complex web of shifting alliances, political competition and intrigue, as well as violence (Francis and Kole 2011: 48).

This documented history of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century factional conflict within the province of Guale provides a new perspective from which to evaluate the social implications of population aggregation during the mid-seventeenth century. As Worth (2002, 2006) has also noted, population aggregation did not result in the erasure of previous social identities oriented along the lines of town affiliation or lineage; rather, aggregated settlements continued to be identified by the names of all the constituent communities, and the associated chiefly lineages persisted even once aggregated. That is, social identities seem to be primarily linked to what Blitz (1999: 583) calls the okla-talwa—the community-level sociopolitical building block of most Southeastern chiefdoms. In this context, the numerous social factors—including tension, turbulence, and turmoil—that would certainly have accompanied population aggregation, while creating uneasy communities and exacerbating factional conflict, deserve serious consideration (Blair 2013: 385–88; Blair and Thomas 2014: 35–37; Worth 1995: 30, 39). What seems clear is that the persistence of distinct chiefly lineages with little loss of town-level social identities during aggregation indicates that reduced mission settlements—including single-ethnicity ones (Worth 2009a) like Mission Santa Catalina—were diverse and pluralistic communities.

Neighborhood Archaeology at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale

If we take seriously the social pluralism evident in the documentary record for Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, we can now examine the second consideration towards adopting the Lightfoot Approach to the archaeology of Mission Santa Catalina de Guale: is the neighborhood framework—similar to that used by Kent at Colony Ross—theoretically and methodologically appropriate for a seventeenth-century Guale mission? And if so, how do we identify such neighborhoods?

As an intermediate sociospatial unit, the neighborhood as an analytic unit has most often been applied to urban contexts (e.g., Arnauld, Manzanilla, and Smith 2012; Pacifico 2014; Stone 2019), though it has also been employed in Mississippian contexts (e.g., Baires, Baltus, and Watts Malouchos 2017; Nelson 2014). Pacifico and Truex suggest that neighborhoods are integrative residential landscapes within broader dense populations. Neighborhoods integrate diverse households . . . [and] articulate their residents with other blocs within the broader landscape. Neighborhoods tend to form under conditions of increasing complexity, population density, social upheaval, or some combination of these (2019: 6). Using this definition, the aggregated colonial landscape of Mission Santa Catalina is precisely the type of context within which neighborhoods might be expected. But did they exist?

While multiple lines of evidence—historical maps, eyewitness accounts, archaeological investigations—provide descriptions of the central mission quadrangles, few descriptions exist of the mission pueblo, the residential areas of the Guale neophytes. Perhaps the best description of what a Guale town looked like comes from Robert Sanford in 1666, describing a town in Orista: The Towne is scituate on the side or rather in the skirts of a faire forrest, in which at several distances are diverse feilds of Maiz with many little houses straglingly amongst them for the habitations of the particular families (Sandford 1911: 91). Jones (1978b: 192) calls this pattern a dispersed town, with maize plots and farmsteads surrounding a town nucleus. But does this description describe a mission pueblo? Can neighborhoods be identified within this context?

To address this question, I used a number of methods long advocated by Kent Lightfoot: systematic surface and subsurface survey (e.g., Lightfoot 1986), topographic mapping, and shallow geophysical prospection (Byram et al. 2018; Lightfoot and Gonzalez 2018a; Lightfoot, Schiff, and Wake 1997; Silliman, Farnsworth, and Lightfoot 2000).

Auger and Topographic Surveys

Auger surveys were conducted by David Hurst Thomas and the American Museum of Natural History team at Mission Santa Catalina in the 1980s. These surveys were designed to identify the location of the mission church and the central quadrangle, as well as help reveal a broader picture of site structure across the mission landscape (Thomas 1987: 114–16, Figures 25 and 27; 1993: 6–7). While primarily designed to narrow the search area for the location of the mission church and central quadrangle, the ceramic distributions generated by the auger survey also provided excellent preliminary data on site structure across much of the mission settlement. Based on these data, Thomas (1987: 114) suggested that the mission Native community may have been divided into discrete neighborhoods, divided by walls and fences along which refuse accumulated. In particular, the distribution of marine shells provided valuable information on the distribution of household shell midden deposits.

At the same time that the auger surveys were being conducted, detailed topographic mapping was also completed across much of the Santa Catalina site. In addition to collecting elevation data, each survey point (at two-meter intervals) was also tested with a steel probe in order to detect subsurface shell deposits (see Thomas 1987: 110). Much like the auger data, the combination of elevation and marine shell distribution highlight the patterning of house middens across the site.

Shallow Geophysical Survey

For the last thirty years, geophysical surveys have played a critical role in archaeological research on St. Catherines Island (e.g., Anuskiewicz 1989; Baker 1982; Blair 2013, 2015; Elliott 2009; Garrison, Baker, and Hurst Thomas1985; Hayden 2007; Mahar 2010, 2013; Shapiro and Williams 1984; Thomas 1987). Early magnetometry surveys were highly successful in the initial search for the mission quadrangle, and for my dissertation research I used both magnetic gradiometry (Figure 1.3) and electrical resistance (Figure 1.4) to explore mission-site structure (Blair 2013, 2015).

Gradiometry survey results for Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. The gradiometry map overlays the mission and surrounding areas in 20-meter grid squares, with approximately 300 by 400 meters of land surveyed. The map includes a scale with 0-, 25-, and 50-meter sections, the map coordinates of N0 E900 (W0) in the south and N300 E900 (W0) in the north, and a scale for survey results from light at -15 nT to dark at 15 nT. This map shows true north instead of “mission north” with the gradiometry results in dark gray with dark and light spots that show areas of interest. The center of the map is whited out with hand drawn buildings representing the mission site.

Figure 1.3. Magnetic gradiometery survey data from Mission Santa Catalina de Guale, plotted from -15 nT to 15 nT. Courtesy of Elliot H. Blair.

Electrical resistivity survey results for Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. The electrical resistivity map overlays the mission and surrounding areas in 20-meter grid squares, with approximately 300 by 400 meters of land surveyed. The map includes a scale with 0-, 30-, and 60-meter sections, the map coordinates of S100 E900 (W0) in the south, and N300 E900 (W0) in the north, and a scale for survey results from light at low resistance to dark at high resistance. This map shows true north instead of “mission north” with the electrical resistivity results in gray with splotches of dark and light areas that show areas of interest. The center of the map displays the hand drawn mission site in a small whited out area.

Figure 1.4. Electrical resistivity survey data from Mission Santa Catalina. Courtesy of Elliot H. Blair.

Mission Neighborhoods

The most significant outcome of the synthesis of these various surveys is the establishment of a detailed map of the distribution of mission-era shell midden deposits (Figure 1.5). These deposits are highly evident as distinct areas of low resistance and topographic rises. The deposits are also readily identifiable by shell probing and closely correspond with ceramic and shell concentrations uncovered during the auger surveys. Significantly, and contra Larson (1978), it is clear that the mission settlement is characterized by the presence of discrete, mounded midden deposits—with each likely associated with an individual household or cluster of households, much like the waste disposal pattern evident during the earlier Irene period (Saunders 2000b).

Map of neighborhoods and shell middens that surround Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. The map is approximately 725 by 600 meters of the Northern La Florida coast. The shell middens are indicated by small gray areas with black lines. The hand drawn mission buildings are located in the south, adjacent to the neighborhood of Wamassee Head. Both areas include several shell middens. South of the mission and across a river is the neighborhood of Fallen Tree with many shell middens. East of the mission is Pueblo East with just a few shell middens. Pueblo North and 9Li210 are north of the mission and include many shell middens in both neighborhoods.

Figure 1.5. Shell middens and neighborhoods at Mission Santa Catalina. Courtesy of Elliot H. Blair.

The majority of magnetic features detected were small dipole features associated with modern metal debris. Due to the low magnetic susceptibility of the coastal sands, the gradiometry survey largely failed to help identify broadscale architectural evidence. This suggests that buildings located within the mission pueblo were not constructed from wattle and daub, unlike the burned wattle and daub structures of the central compound, which were readily detected during early surveys.

Based on the results of these surveys—particularly the distribution of household shell midden deposits, surrounding the mission quadrangle and separated by several physiographic features—five residential neighborhoods were defined. From south to north these are: Fallen Tree, Wamassee Head, the Pueblo East, the Pueblo North, and 9Li210.

Neighborhood Diversity at Mission Santa Catalina

Having now established that the Guale community at Mission Santa Catalina can be considered plural, and that a neighborhood framework