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The Timucuan Chiefdoms of Spanish Florida: Volume II: Resistance and Destruction

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This book, the second in Worth's two-volume set on the Timucuan chiefdoms of Spanish Florida, details the ways in which the missionized Timucuan peoples of northern Florida succumbed to the pressures of European colonization and disappeared as cultures by the 18th century.

The Timucua entered the Spanish colonial system through the mechanism of missionization: the conversion of entire chiefdoms to Roman Catholicism and the establishment of missions in Timucuan territory. But the same mechanisms that led to Timucuan assimilation also led to population collapse due to disease, forced labor, and conflict between the peoples of Spanish La Florida and the emerging British colonies to the north - most particularly Carolina, after the establishment of Charles Town by 1670. Caught within the greater conflicts that exploded into open war by the beginnings of the 18th century, the Timucuan peoples were destroyed as cultures by the 1750's; the last recorded Timucuan Indians left Florida with the Spanish in 1763.

Worth's books provide thorough and detailed historic accounts of the end of Florida's most numerous Native peoples, as well as detailed information and predictions about the locations of the "lost missions" - the Spanish missions recorded by the Spanish as existing but whose locations have since been lost. Both for the archaeologist and historian and the interested general reader, these books are excellent.