St. Catherines is the story of how a team of archaeologists found the lost sixteenth-century Spanish mission of Santa Catalina de Guale on the coastal Georgia island now known as St. Catherines. The discovery of mission Santa Catalina has contributed significantly to knowledge about early inhabitants of the island and about the Spanish presence in Georgia nearly two centuries before the arrival of British colonists.

This volume considers the zooarchaeological evidence for animal use by Spaniards and the Guale people during the First Spanish period (a.d. 1565-1763) on St. Catherines Island, Georgia (USA). The focus is on a combined archaeofaunal assemblage containing 70,324 specimens and the remains of an estimated 510 vertebrate individuals associated with Mission Santa Catalina de Guale. This Spanish mission operated on the island from the 1580s until 1680 in a province known as Spanish Florida. Spanish Florida formerly encompassed portions of the present-day states of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, and was the first sustained European colonial enterprise north of Mexico. For many years the rich Spanish heritage of the southeastern United States was neglected as a field of study. Spanish colonists themselves often characterized Spanish Florida as a place of poverty, neglect, and ruin. Over the last 30 years, however, archaeologists have demonstrated that this concept of the colony...

Indigenous Landscapes and Spanish Missions offers a holistic view on the consequences of mission enterprises and how native peoples actively incorporated Spanish colonialism into their own landscapes. An innovative reorientation spanning the northern limits of Spanish colonialism, this volume brings together a variety of archaeologists focused on placing indigenous agency in the foreground of mission interpretation.