The Mocama: New name for an old people & Timucuan History Update

[stjr]

Congrats to the Times Union on running this unique historical account of the First Coast area.  We need more of these stories to better enlighten us to the past amongst which we live.  A greater appreciation of our long history might lead us to better preserve it.  Keep up the good work, T-U.

The Mocama: New name for an old people
Their dialect and new name come from their source of food and life - the salt marshes.

    * By Matt Soergel
    * Story updated at 2:12 AM on Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009

They didn't leave many signs that they had been here, those who lived here before us near the mouth of the St. Johns River, along the Beaches, on the barrier islands to the north.

There was no local rock to mold, no metals to work. There were just piles of shells from the oysters they ate and burial mounds where people were laid to rest after often elaborate ceremonies.

Among those mounds, archaeologists have found a few scattered treasures: tiny cobs of corn, shell arrowheads and decorations, shards of pottery. They also discovered pieces of copper and rock that provide tantalizing clues that these people were hardly isolated here at the salty edge of the continent.

For years, they've been known as the Timucua, lumped in with about 35 chiefdoms scattered across 19,000 square miles of North Florida and South Georgia. Archaeologists, though, say that those who lived along the coast - from south of the St. Johns River to St. Simons Island - were a distinct group that should be known as the Mocama.

The word translates roughly to "of the sea," and it's an apt name for those whose lives were governed by their maritime environment.

No one knows how the Indians referred to themselves. But Mocama was the dialect spoken by the Timucua along the coast, according to the Spanish who lived among them and who named the area the Mocama province. And a mission founded by the Spanish on southern Cumberland Island reflected that name: Mission San Pedro de Mocama.

"The Mocama were people of the water, be it the Intracoastal or the Atlantic," said Robert Thunen of the University of North Florida.

He and a UNF colleague, Keith Ashley, are among the archaeologists who have been working to learn more about the Mocama. They have evidence that these Indians were part of a vast trading network before the Europeans arrived and painstakingly have been piecing together what life was like just before first contact with Europeans.

Researchers in the past 25 years have taken giant leaps in their understanding of Florida's Native Americans, said Jerald T. Milanich, a University of Florida scholar who's written numerous books on the subject.

He credits Thunen and Ashley with helping to figure out the comings-and-goings of Indian groups in Northeast Florida - as well as their interaction with French and Spanish colonists, well before Jamestown or Plymouth.

Though often overlooked in history books, it's an important subject, said Milanich.

"The First Coast is literally that, the place where old and new worlds clashed, setting the stage for the European conquest of the eastern United States," he said.

Among the Timucua - who were named for the language they spoke -there were probably 11 dialects, said Ashley. Mocama speakers were congregated from the mouth of the St. Johns River and the nearby barrier islands, extending to just past the site of today's Dames Point bridge. After that the salt water became too fresh to support the oysters and fish they thrived on.

The Mocama were at the center of a crucial part of early American history: Fort Caroline.

It was there, in what's now Jacksonville, that the French got a toehold in the New World in 1564, living among - and eventually annoying - the native Mocama speakers. By 1565, that outpost was overrun by the Spanish, who based themselves in St. Augustine so they could run the French out.

Correcting history

The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens on Thurday opened an exhibition of work by Jacques Le Moyne, a French artist who was on the expedition to colonize Fort Caroline. Also in the exhibit is the work of Theodore de Bry, who made engravings of Mocama life said to be based on lost paintings by Le Moyne.

The engravings have been influential for centuries, but archaeologists now consider them highly unreliable - perhaps entirely fanciful. The helmets of French soldiers were on backward, and the Indians bore more than a little resemblance to natives of Brazil. Then there were the mountains rising in the background - in Florida. De Bry, unlike Le Moyne, was never in Florida.

"These drawings showed Europeans what they wanted to see, not necessarily what was going on," said Thunen. "It was part salesmanship and part political intrigue."

To find the real story, UNF archaeologists and students have been conducting digs on land along the coastal estuaries where the Mocama lived. And on Black Hammock Island in the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, they are investigating what Ashley believes was a Spanish mission.

From the site of the mission, swatting mosquitoes, he looked out at Big Talbot and Fort George islands and described how villages would have been scattered among them, reached by dugout canoes.

People had been living there for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived. Ashley said pottery from the area has been dated to as far back as 2500 B.C.; it's the oldest pottery found in the United States, except perhaps for slightly older material from the Savannah River area.

Within the past 10 years, archaeologists have been able to figure out what kind of pottery was being made, as well as where and when it was made. That tells them more about migration patterns before and after the Europeans arrived.

And it's clear, Ashley said, that about 1,000 years ago, the Mocama were connected to Cahokia, a large, sophisticated American Indian settlement near St. Louis and to a related culture near Macon, Ga.

Copper from the Appalachians - and some from as far away as Lake Superior - has been found at Mocama sites, much of it by Clarence B. Moore, a rich, eccentric Philadelphian who in the 1890s excavated two huge Indian mounds along the St. Johns River on Mill Cove.

Shells and shark teeth from Mocama territory have been found as far away as Wisconsin and Michigan, where they were exotic, prized items.

Ashley thinks Mocama traders traveled to the sites near Macon, and could have gone all the way to Cahokia. His reasoning: Much copper from the Cahokia culture has been found in Jacksonville, but not much has been dug up in between. If there were a series of middlemen between the two destinations, there would be signs of the material along the way.

"The common perception is that these guys are sequestered here in the salt marsh, that this is the only world they know," said Ashley. "But in all reality, they were involved in far-flung trade networks all over the Southeast."

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2009-10-18/story/the_mocama_new_name_for_an_old_people

The tribe 'of the sea’
Piecing together portrait of the Mocama before Europeans arrived here

    * By Matt Soergel
    * Story updated at 12:41 AM on Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009

From their ships traveling along the low coast, European explorers could see signs of life: the smoky plumes of cooking fires rising into the humid air.

The smoke came from villages scattered along the saltwater estuaries, where these people had lived for hundreds if not thousands of years.

They were the Mocama, Indians who settled around the mouth of the St. Johns River, plucking oysters and fish from the water.

They didn’t call themselves the Mocama â€" no one knows their name. But Mocama was what they spoke, a dialect of the Timucua language. It means “of the sea,” and it’s fitting for these fisher-folk who settled on choice real estate in the vast waterways that sprawl toward the Georgia coast.

They were there when French explorers sailed into the St. Johns in 1562. And as his men set up a stone marker claiming the Mocama land for France, the natives greeted them “with gentleness and kindness,” wrote Capt. Jean Ribault.

Many people would die, though, in the years to come. The French were slaughtered by the Spanish just five years later. And in the decades after that, thousands upon thousands of Indians were killed, most from disease â€" smallpox, measles, influenza â€" for which they had no biological defense.

By 1710, observers said that northeastern Florida was basically empty of human life. There was little left but those saltwater estuaries where the Mocama had lived for so long.

Living on the sea

More than 10,000 years ago, Florida was twice as wide, cooler and more arid than it is now. Ocean levels were much lower, as water was locked in massive ice caps. The first Floridians lived there, hunting a now-extinct bison species, mammoths and mastodons.

Evidence suggests they just passed through what is now Northeast Florida, said Keith Ashley, a University of North Florida archaeologist. Their settlements were instead set up around limestone watering holes and springs farther inland, or perhaps out on a coast now under water.

But the Ice Age ended, and the oceans rose. By about 4000 B.C., the coastal estuaries began to look like those of today. People began moving into the islands and uplands of Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia, attracted by what kept people in the area until the end of the Mocama: sea life.

The people made nets and weirs to trap fish. They fished in the surf and from dugout canoes in the rivers and creeks. They collected oysters, throwing the shells into piles that grew over the centuries.

By about A.D. 600, bows and arrows were in use, with shells and fire-hardened wood for arrowheads, unless you could get limestone chert from central Florida. They hunted deer, possum and rabbits.

Alligators too: Near Fort Caroline, archaeologists found the remains of an alligator pierced with projectile points. The gator, by the way, had human remains inside it.

By about 1450, the Mocama were growing tiny ears of corn in upland areas to supplement their diet.

They weren’t just an isolated, backwater tribe. Copper and rocks found in burial mounds show that from 900 to about 1250 the Mocama were part of a vast trading network that stretched to a huge Indian civilization near St. Louis â€" and perhaps even farther.

Mocama life

Much of the little evidence left behind by the Mocama has been paved over, under subdivisions and parking lots. Yet archaeologists have been able to piece together clues to their life, both in what they unearth and in the writings of the French and Spanish who lived among them.

They liked to smoke tobacco. They drank tea made from yaupon holly leaves, a tree found throughout Jacksonville. The black brew had caffeine in it, and was also used to make you vomit, for a ceremonial purging effect. They used herbs for healing.

They had elaborate burial rituals, prayed before meals, whistled for good luck and were obsessed with a game that involved teams competing to get a small ball to hit a target on top of a pole. Players painted themselves in team colors, and villages bet on the games.

Parents played in the shade with their children. They made baskets, and in open-pit fires they created some of the earliest pottery in North America.

They lived in palm-thatched huts in scattered villages that also had a large central hall. It was a matrilineal society, meaning that power and inheritance and clan status moved through the mother’s side of the family. Female chiefs were not the norm, but they were not uncommon.

The Mocama indulged in occasional raids with rival groups. Another Timucua chief was based around fresh water north of Palatka; the French noted that the two were fierce enemies.

Life expectancy was in the 30s or 40s, though some lived to be older. As they aged, their teeth were worn flat, probably from sand in the food and using their teeth as a vise.

All in all, life wasn’t bad, said John Worth, a Timucua scholar at the University of West Florida.

“The Spanish would have considered it a miserable experience, eating oysters, roots, insects, snakes,” he said. “But if you take in the cultural context, they had a diverse and very healthy diet, they were not starving or skinny, they were not overworked and, as far as we could tell, they had a very thriving society that lived in a good balance with their resources.”

Fall of a people

No one knows how many people lived in this area when the Europeans came.

Jerald T. Milanich, a University of Florida professor who’s written extensively about the state’s Indians, has estimated that there were maybe 200,000 Timucua speakers scattered over 19,000 square miles of North Florida and South Georgia. That number dwindled quickly.

In 1587, the Spanish began a system of missions staffed by Franciscan friars charged with converting the Indians to Catholicism. Some Mocama people melted away into the woods rather than submit, but for the rest there was considerable pressure to convert.

“It was either do it or die,” said Craig Morris, a park ranger at Fort Caroline National Memorial. “I’m sorry, but the Spanish were kind of brutal that way.”

Even so, there were occasional revolts, even well into the 1600s (Lucas Menendez, a Timucua chief, was garroted after leading a rebellion in 1656).

To be sure, some of the Franciscans were sympathetic and interested in the Timucua speakers. One friar, Francisco Pareja, based among the Mocama on Fort George Island, translated religious texts into Timucua and wrote voluminously about the people under his care.

However, standing behind the missionaries was the Spanish military â€" a group that wanted the natives to assimilate quickly into Spanish culture. To their thinking, that would save their souls while making them more useful as laborers and protection.

Florida, without gold or great natural resources, wasn’t that attractive to the Spanish, so few were flocking to come to the swampy outpost. The only thing that could make the garrison at St. Augustine work was the thousands of assimilated Indians.

But they were dying, and as they died, more and more Mocama were drawn closer to the St. Augustine outpost to provide labor.

Toward the end, there was a second cruel blow from the north: Yamassee Indians, at the bidding of the English at Charleston, swept through Mocama territory on bloody slave raids.

“It was tumultuous, chaotic,” said UNF’s Ashley. “People were dying left and right, new people had come into their land, taking it over. I think it hit them quickly, before they knew what was going on.”

By the first decade of the 1700s, the mission system was gone, except for about 400 Indians clinging to St. Augustine, said Worth. In 1763, the British took over St. Augustine, and some Indians went into hiding, probably joining other refugees known to the Spanish as the Cimarrone, or wild ones â€" a name that eventually became the Seminole.

Others left with the Spanish for Cuba. Among them, according to census records, was a Timucua named Juan Alonso Cabale. He died in 1767 in Cuba, 205 years after the first Europeans landed in his ancestors’ home.

He was, as far as anyone can tell, the last of the Timucua.

http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2009-10-18/story/the_tribe_of_the_sea%E2%80%99

[Charles Hunter]

Very interesting article.  Is a shame that development took place before the archeology could be done.

[lindab]

Kudos to the T.U. reporters for a good in-depth article. Yes, your readers can read and do appreciate stories with some depth.