Excavations at the Ximenez-Fatio House,St. Augustine,Florida

Historical Archaeology -     

The rights of a Florida wife: slavery, U.S. expansion, and married women's property law

Civil law rules were adopted in Florida that granted married women property rights long before legal reforms occurred in northern states. This article analyzes white wives' property and law in Florida between 1820 and 1860. Initially, married women's property rights were inadvertently protected by treaty law and limited to women who married before 1818. Wives' right to own separate property in Florida was subsequently reconfirmed in statute and extended to include later marriages. In contrast, nonwhites generally lost the rights and property they had enjoyed under Spain's civil law in the same period. This contrast reveals that in Florida (and other southern borderlands) it was not concern for women, or simply legal precedent, but the desire to incorporate new territory and expand slavery that influenced the development of marital property law. This challenges previous histories, which have excluded the earlier acts in the Southern borderlands and emphasized those passed in the Northeast beginning in the late 1840s. While those later acts were influenced by the early woman's rights movement and by concern for families reduced to poverty during the rise of market capitalism, this case study indicates that expansion of United States territory and slavery were responsible for the earlier married women's property rights in southern borderland territories such as Florida.     

Black Geographies of Respite: Relief,Recuperation, and Resonance at Florida A&M University

In this article, I argue that places of respite provide relief from the burdens of oppressive articulations and experiences of society and space and are produced through three general practices: relief as a practice that mitigates psychological and physical burdens of oppression; recuperation as a form of (self-)care that can help heal harms; and affirmative resonance as a practice of counter-storytelling that challenges hegemonic social narratives and internalises affirmative narratives for marginalised peoples. Through a case study with members of the Marching 100 at Florida A&M University (FAMU), I demonstrate how these relational practices produce FAMU as a multiscalar place of respite for black students. Finally, I claim that places of respite, produced through a black sense of place, offer scholars interested in affirmative black geographies an ontological object produced by (and productive of) visions and practices of black life and produced for the celebration and protection of black lives.     

Frontiers of Contact: Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida

The arrival of Europeans in the New World had profound and long-lasting results for the native peoples. The record for the impact of this fundamental change in culture, society, and biology of Native Americans is well documented historically. This paper reviews the biological impact of the arrival of Europeans on native populations via the study of pre- and postcontact skeletal remains in Spanish Florida, the region today represented by coastal Georgia and northern Florida. The postcontact skeletal series, mostly drawn from Roman Catholic mission sites, are among the most comprehensive in the Americas, providing a compelling picture of adaptation and stress in this setting. Study of paleopathology, dental and skeletal indicators of physiological stress, stable isotope (carbon and nitrogen) analysis, tooth microwear, and skeletal morphology (cross-sectional geometry) reveals major alterations in quality of life and lifestyle. The bioarchaeological record indicates a general deterioration in health, declining dietary diversity and nutritional quality, and increasing workload in the contact period. The impact of contact in Spanish Florida appears to have been more dramatic in comparison with other regions, which likely reflects the different nature of contact relations in this setting versus other areas (e.g., New England, New France). The bioarchaeological record represents an important information source for understanding the dynamics of biocultural change resulting from colonization and conquest.