American Indians After A.D. 1492: A Case Study of Forced Culture Change

Perfect counterimages were created when Europeans and American Indians met for the first time in the late 15th century. Unfortunately, historic documents have preserved only one‐half of the image. How did the survivors of epidemics, enslavements, and brutalities react to the disruptions in their lives brought about by trespassers from another continent? In this article I examine the historic and archeological evidence for migration into Florida as one of the strategies employed by the displaced people from the Caribbean Islands. The existing records are enhanced by archeological investigations at wet sites, such as Hontoon Island, where surviving biological materials offer information about environment, human skeletons, diet, technologies, and artistic creations in bone and wood that usually perish on dryland sites. At Hoonton Island, water‐saturated strata that were not trampled or compressed after deposition revealed that the midden was composed of a prehistoric and an early historic component. The presence of a number of European artifacts led to the conclusion that the extensive changes documented in six of the seven categories of recovered material items resulted either from direct or indirect contact with Europeans or with Indians fleeing the Europeans. New designs on bone objects occur in the early historic period. I attempt to trace the source of one of these designs in an effort to determine the direction of flow for the changes. The use of trait lists to establish relationships is not popular but, in this instance, the investigation of a specific design is enlightening.