Social Dimensions of Evolutionary Research: Discovering Native American History in Colonial Southeastern U.S.

Abstract

Beginning in the late sixteenth century, a series of Spanish missions was built in coastal Georgia and northern Florida. These missions were designed to convert and "civilize" the indigenous peoples of the region and establish a Spanish presence in the southeastern United States. The colony was not a success, and the missions were destroyed by the English by 1706. The native population fared poorly and suffered massive loss of people due to epidemics and colonial period hardships. In this paper, I discuss microevolutionary analyses of archeological skeletal samples representing the native populations from the region. Analyses document changing patterns of variation and intergroup biological integration through time. Formal evolutionary interpretations are offered, but these are reinterpreted with respect to the social and historical context of the time period. Specifically, patterns of variation suggest a nascent Catholic Indian identity was emergent in Spanish Florida when the missions were destroyed. While this may indicate an evolutionary and historical "dead end" for the indigenous peoples of Florida, further interpretation of the data with respect to the later history of the early Seminole people suggests a continuous biological history can be inferred, linking Spanish period (seventeenth century) and Seminole period (eighteenth century) peoples of Florida within a unified historical narrative. This complex, ephemeral history has repercussions for interpreting evolutionary genetic data within a strict cladistic framework. In addition, this research contributes a humanistic component to the evolutionary sciences with respect to cultural patrimony and oral traditions, in this case, of the Seminole peoples.

Engaging bodies in the public imagination: Bioarchaeology as social science, science, and humanities

“…A second research goal is to use human remains as a means to inform on broader sociocultural phenomena within highly contextualized framework. Examples here include recent work related to a host of diverse topics including: embodiment (Borić and Robb, ; Duncan and Hofling, ; Duncan and Schwarz, 2014, in press a, in press b; Gillespie, ; Jones, ; Meskell and Joyce, ; Rebay‐Salisbury et al, ; Tiesler, ; White et al, ), gender (Geller, ), inequality (Barrett and Blakey, ; Blakey, ; Klaus, ; Nystrom, ), ethnogenesis (Klaus, ; Klaus and Tam, ; Kurin, ; Stojanowski, ), violence (Knüsel and Smith, ; Martin et al, ; see below), identity (Agarwal and Glencross, ; Baadsgaard et al, 2011; Buikstra and Scott, ; Gowland and Knüsel, ; Knudson and Stojanowski, ; Sofaer, ), deviance (Murphy, ), childhood (Halcrow and Tayles, ; Lewis, ; Perry, ; Tiesler, ), public memory (Tarlow, ; Williams, ), and disability (Tilley and Oxenham, ; Waldron, ). Finally, a third research focus adopts a decidedly humanistic approach (e.g., Boutin, ; Robb, ) in which researchers use human remains and their contexts to tell the story of individuals and groups to identify and bring to life similarities and differences in personal experiences through time and space.…”

Diet and death in times of war: isotopic and osteological analysis of mummified human remains from southern Mongolia

“…While historical sources provide valuable insights into this region during the 13the17th centuries, they provide a primarily "top-down" (Stojanowski, 2011) perspective, focusing on major political centers and economic policies, with less attention to individual communities and local level economic and political systems. The osteological and multi-isotopic approach employed here provides a valuable complement to these sources by focusing on variation within and among individuals in an attempt to place them within this larger historical context.…”