"Excavations on the Franciscan Frontier offers new perspectives on a little-known aspect of seventeenth-century La Florida, the western Timucuan-Franciscan mission frontier. Weisman's book illuminates both mission organization and the material culture of American Indians and Spaniards of interior northern Florida during this period."--Kathleen A. Deagan, and author of Artifacts of Spanish Colonies

In 1949, tantalizing discoveries of Spanish and Indian artifacts in the waters of Fig Springs in North Florida hinted at the location of an early seventeenth-century mission...

"An excellent publication on an important southeastern site. . . . This book is a superb archaeological report."--Popular Archaeology"A landmark publication by one of the great American archaeologists, it should be read not only by southeastern specialists but by all concerned with agriculture and ceremonial life in the precolumbian New World."--Michael D. Coe, Curator, Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University
Raising intriguing questions about the relationship of South Florida's prehistoric population to the Caribbean basin and about the origins of maize agriculture in...

These important essays address the biological consequences of the arrival of Europeans in the New World and on the lifeways of native populations following contact in the late 16th century. Moving away from monocausal explanations of population change, they maintain that disease should be viewed as only a facet of a complex problem and that issues relating to diet, nutrition, activity, the work environment, and social and political change are equally important.

Exploring the long-standing question of the origins of syphilis, this book proposes a new understanding of the dynamic interactions of disease and culture in the New World. It brings together a complete picture of the diverse pathological evidence of a bacterial disease--treponematosis--manifest in the North American archaeological record at the time of Christopher Columbus's first journey, and it presents a strong argument against the earlier identification of modern venereal syphilis with indigenous North American treponemal disease. For almost 500 years, native North Americans have been...