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The Mocama: New name for an old people

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Shelly Gauthier
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« on: October 19, 2009, 02:10:54 am »

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.
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Shelly Gauthier
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« Reply #1 on: October 19, 2009, 02:11:22 am »

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.
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Shelly Gauthier
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« Reply #2 on: October 19, 2009, 02:11:43 am »

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.
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Shelly Gauthier
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« Reply #3 on: October 19, 2009, 02:12:06 am »

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.
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Shelly Gauthier
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« Reply #4 on: October 19, 2009, 02:12:32 am »

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."

matt.soergel@jacksonville.com, (904) 359-4082

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