Spanish Florida’s eighteenth-century presidios and the tale of their ceramics

Abstract

ABSTRACT At the turn of the eighteenth century, two military presidios – West Florida and San Agustín – anchored the shrinking and besieged colony of Spanish Florida. Unlike San Agustín that stayed in one place, the West Florida presidio was relocated three times, creating four geographically separate and chronologically sequential sites of the same community and enabling fine-grained temporal analyses. Here, I analyze ceramic trends that reveal three Mexican majolica types, Olive Jar, and the tempering agents of Native American ceramics that are temporally sensitive. However, these ceramic trends are a cautionary tale as they may be specific only to the West Florida Hispanic and Native American settlements in this region. When comparing the ceramics from West Florida and San Agustín, the main difference is a much higher proportion of Native American ceramics in San Agustín, which I attribute to the presence of many Indian and local mestizo women in their households. This demographic was not as substantial in West Florida. The differences in the two eighteenth-century Spanish Florida presidios reflects flexibility at the local level in implementing a highly regulated Spanish imperial system that enabled their colonial empire to include innumerable indigenous cultures in a variety of historic circumstances.