Fort San Juan and the Limits of Empire: Colonialism and Household Practice at the Berry Site.

Fort San Juan and the Limits of EmpireColonialism and Household Practice at the Berry Site

Edited by Robin A. Beck, Christopher B. Rodning, and David G. Moore

University Press of FloridaGainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca Raton

Pensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota

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Copyright 2016 by Robin A. Beck, Christopher B. Rodning, and David G. MooreAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America on acid-free paper

This book may be available in an electronic edition.

21 20 19 18 17 16 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

University Press of Florida15 Northwest 15th StreetGainesville, FL 32611-2079http://www.upf.com

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To the memory ofPatsy Nesbitt Berry

(1935–2012)and

Charles Melvin Hudson Jr.(1932–2013)

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Contents

List of Figures ix List of Plates xiii List of Tables xv Acknowledgments xvii

I. Joara, Cuenca, and Fort San Juan 1 1. Introduction 5

Robin A. Beck, David G. Moore, and Christopher B. Rodning

II. Who They Were: Situating the Colonial Encounter 27 2. Joara in Time and Space 31


3. Recollections of the Juan Pardo Expeditions: The 1584 Domingo de León Account 58John E. Worth

III. Where They Lived: Household Archaeology at Fort San Juan 81 4. The Built Environment of the Berry Site Spanish Compound 85

Robin A. Beck, David G. Moore, Christopher B. Rodning, Sarah Sherwood, and Elizabeth T. Horton

5. Wood Selection and Technology in Structures 1 and 5 150Lee Ann Newsom

IV. What They Ate: Politics, Food, and Provisioning 233 6. People, Plants, and Early Frontier Food 237

Gayle J. Fritz

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7. Fauna, Subsistence, and Survival at Fort San Juan 271Heather A. Lapham

V. What They Carried: Material Culture and Household Practice 301 8. Spanish Material Culture from the Berry Site 303

Christopher B. Rodning, Robin A. Beck, David G. Moore, and James Legg

9. Native Material Culture from the Spanish Compound 341David G. Moore, Christopher B. Rodning, and Robin A. Beck

VI. What They Left Behind: Fragments of the Colonial Encounter 369 10. Conclusions 373

Robin A. Beck, Christopher B. Rodning, and David G. Moore

References Cited 383 List of Contributors 417 Index 419

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Figures

1.1. Route of Juan Pardo’s first expedition, 1566–1567 000 1.2. Hernando Moyano’s forays in the Appalachian Mountains, 1567

000 1.3. Towns visited by Juan Pardo’s second expedition, 1567–1568 000 1.4. Berry site excavations in 1986, looking north 000 1.5. Berry site excavations, 1986–2013 000 2.1. Berry site in topographic setting 000 2.2. Major Burke phase sites mentioned in text 000 2.3. Lamar-style complicated-stamped jar rims from Berry site 000 2.4. Lamar-style incised cazuela bowl from Berry site 000 2.5. Native towns and phases in Carolina Piedmont, A.D. 1450–1600

000 2.6. Plan view of Structures 1 and 2 at Ensley site 000 2.7. T. F. Nelson Mound, Caldwell County 000 2.8. Iron artifacts and Citico gorget from T. F. Nelson Triangle, Caldwell

County 000 2.9. Large Burke phase settlements near Berry site 000 2.10. Histogram of Burke phase sites along Upper Creek/Warrior Fork

000 3.1. Domingo de León’s “mental map” of La Florida’s physical and social

geography 000 4.1. Plan map of Berry site Spanish compound 000 4.2. Structure 3 after plow zone removal, 2003 000 4.3. Excavation units in Structure 1, 2003 000 4.4. Excavations in Structure 1, 2003 000 4.5. Structure 5 after plow zone removal, 2007 000 4.6. Structure 5 excavation units 000

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x · Figures

4.7. Excavating plow scars over Structure 5, 2007 000 4.8. Rivercane (Arundinaria sp.) culms in Structure 5 000 4.9. Comparison of primary culm nodes in rivercane 000 4.10. Steelyard scale “hook” fragment from Structure 5, Unit 54 000 4.11. Small quartz crystal from Structure 5, Unit 54 000 4.12. Feature 91, central hearth in Structure 5 000 4.13. Plan map of Structure 5 at top of subsoil 000 4.14. Detail of posthole, post mold, and carbonized post in Structure 5,

Unit 2 000 4.15. Structure 1 excavation units 000 4.16. East-west profile across south corner of Structure 1 000 4.17. North-south profile across south corner of Structure 1 000 4.18. Feature 114, central hearth in Structure 1 000 4.19. Excavations in entryway of Structure 1 000 4.20. Profile and cross section of Structure 1 entry trenches 000 4.21. Plan map of Structure 1 at top of subsoil, showing posthole

distribution 000 4.22. Carbonized base of western central support post, OG#21 000 4.23. Excavation of OG#21/61 posthole 000 4.24. Plan map of Berry site Spanish compound showing features with

European artifacts 000 4.25. Feature 23 000 4.26. Feature 23 profiles 000 4.27. Feature 25 000 4.28. Feature 25 profiles 000 4.29. Feature 38 000 4.30. Feature 64, 68, 69, and 83 cluster at base of plow zone 000 4.31. Features 64 and 68 profiles 000 4.32. Features 69 and 83 profiles 000 4.33. Feature 92 000 4.34. Feature 112 000 4.35. Western feature and midden complex 000 4.36. Feature 66 000 4.37. Feature 71 000 4.38. Plan map of Spanish compound, first-phase buildings and features

000

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Figures · xi

4.39. Feature 76 after excavation 000 4.40. Plan map of Spanish compound, second-phase buildings and

features 000 4.41. Geometry linking Structure 1, Structure 2, Structure 5, and Feature

76 000 4.42. Plan map of second-phase Spanish compound 000 4.43. Square postholes 1109 and 1176 000 4.44. Plan map of second-phase Spanish compound showing plaza and

square post clusters 000 5.1. Structure 1 floor plan with organic samples plotted 000 5.2. Structure 5 floor plan with organic samples plotted 000 5.3. Histogram comparing roundwood diameters from Structures 1 and

5 000 5.4. Age classes for roundwood, including posts, from Structures 1 and 5

000 5.5. OG#21c (Structure 5) 000 5.6. OG#21h (Structure 5) 000 5.7. OG#25 (Structure 5) 000 5.8. OG#48b (Structure 5) 000 5.9. OG#3 (Structure 1) 000 5.10. OG#19i (Structure 1) 000 5.11. OG#44 (Structure 1) 000 5.12. OG#32b (Structure 1) 000 5.13. OG#84 (Structure 1) 000 5.14. Structure 1 timbers OG#78 and OG#81 000 5.15. OG#81 (Structure 1) 000 5.16. OG#10 (Structure 1) 000 5.17. OG#39 (Structure 1) 000 5.18. OG#20b (Structure 1) 000 6.1. Ubiquity values of maize and nutshell 000 6.2. Density values of maize and nutshell 000 6.3. Maize kernel-to-cob ratio values across contexts at Berry site 000 6.4. Percentages of food plant remains, early and late pit features 000 6.5. Box plots for maize, hickory nut, and acorn shell fragments, early

and late pit features 000

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xii · Figures

6.6. Nutshell frequencies in Spanish compound compared to other sites in region 000

6.7. Intersite comparison of kernel-to-cob ratios 000 7.1. Main taxa at Berry mound and Spanish compound 000 7.2. Main mammals at Catawba Meadows village, Berry mound, and

Spanish compound 000 7.3. Meat-bearing limbs and butchery waste for white-tailed deer and

black bear 000 7.4. Main mammals in early and late features in Spanish compound

000 7.5. Meat-bearing limbs and butchery waste in Spanish compound

features for white-tailed deer and black bear 000 8.1. Spanish olive jar fragments 000 8.2. Spanish pottery 000 8.3. Chain mail links and fragments 000 8.4. Iron jack-plate fragment from posthole in Structure 5 000 8.5. Lead artifacts 000 8.6. Definitive Spanish nails and tacks 000 8.7. Possible Spanish nails (category B in Legg’s analysis) 000 8.8. Possible sheet iron pan 000 8.9. Iron clothing fasteners and ball button 000 8.10. Copper or brass aglets, tinkling cones, and beads 000 8.11. Copper or brass bell fragments 000 8.12. Miscellaneous copper or alloy fragments 000 8.13. Glass beads 000 8.14. Iron knife from Burial 1 000 8.15. Wrought iron fragment recovered during troweling of Structure 5

000 8.16. Unidentified iron fragments from structures and features 000 9.1. Geographic distribution of Burke series pottery 000 9.2. Vessel forms 000 9.3. Features 129 and 145 with exposed pottery 000 9.4. Pisgah vessels from Feature 112 000 9.5. Pisgah and Dallas vessels 000 9.6. Ceramic elbow pipes 000

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Plates

Plates follow page 000. 1. Plan map of the Berry site Spanish compound 2. Photomosaic of Structure 5, base of plow zone 3. Photomosaic of Structure 5, top of Zone 3 4. Plan map of organic remains in Zone 3, Structure 5 5. Photomosaic of Structure 5, top of Zone 4/subsoil 6. Removing plow zone above Structure 1, 2008 7. Photomosaic of Structure 1, top of Zone 4 8. Plan map of organic remains in Zone 4, Structure 1 9. Plan map of organic remains in Zone 4, Structure 1, with small wood

removed 10. Photomosaic of Structure 1, top of subsoil 11. Thin section of sediments from Structure 1, showing clay papules

added through levigation 12. Thin section of sediments from hearth area in Structure 1, showing

clay papules added through levigation

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Tables

5.1. Archaeological wood taxa from Structures 1 and 5 000 5.2. Upright posts from Structure 1 000 5.3. Upright posts from Structure 5 000 5.4. Nonpost wood samples from Structure 1 000 5.5. Nonpost wood samples from Structure 5 000 5.6. Growth ring observations and harvest periods for Structure 1

samples 000 5.7. Growth ring observations and harvest periods for Structure 5

samples 000 5.8. Proportion classes for roundwood 000 5.9. Tool mark measurements 000 5.10. Tertiary construction elements from Structures 1 and 5 000 5.11. Charcoal from fuelwood contexts 000 6.1. Macrobotanical remains from the Berry site Spanish compound

000 6.2. Breakdown by context of maize fragments from the Berry site

Spanish compound 000 6.3. Nonfruit seeds from the Berry site 000 6.4. Intersite comparison of maypops and grape seeds 000 7.1. Animal remains from the Spanish compound and mound contexts at

the Berry site 000 7.2. Animal remains from the Catawba Meadows site 000 7.3. White-tailed deer and black bear body portions 000 7.4. White-tailed deer and black bear body portions in Spanish

compound features 000 8.1. Sixteenth-century material culture from Santa Elena 000

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xvi · Tables

8.2. Sixteenth-century items imported to La Florida 000 8.3. Supplies issued to Captain Juan Pardo’s expeditions 000 8.4. Supplies issued to Captain Juan Pardo’s forts 000 8.5. Sixteenth-century Spanish-related artifacts from the Berry site 000 8.6. Glass beads from the Berry site 000 9.1. Distribution of artifacts from excavated features in the Spanish

compound 000 9.2. Vessel number and form from Spanish compound features 000

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Acknowledgments

Our joint research at the Berry site began in 2001, and we have returned to continue work there each subsequent year. Most of the data that we ana-lyze and discuss in the pages that follow were recovered during the 2001 to 2010 seasons from that part of the site that we refer to as the Spanish compound. There are many institutions and individuals whose contribu-tions have made our work not only possible but a joy, and we would like to acknowledge them here. First, we want to thank the entire Berry family for their stewardship of this incredible site, but we especially want to recognize James and Pat Berry, together with their son, Burton, and his family. Pat Berry passed away in 2012, and we miss the charm and wit that accompa-nied her near-daily visits to the site with James during our field seasons. If the Berry family has enabled the practical side of our work, then our greatest intellectual debt is to Charles Hudson. It is safe to say—in more ways than we can recount here—that Charlie was the force that brought all of us to Berry. Although none of us (Beck, Moore, and Rodning) was ever formally Charlie’s student, we have all benefitted immensely from his guid-ance, encouragement, and unbounded enthusiasm through the years. Our debt to him is both professional and personal. Sadly, Charlie, too, passed away before we were able to bring the book to publication. We therefore dedicate it to these two people—Pat and Charlie—who have meant the world to us and whom we miss dearly. Since 2001, several institutions have provided our academic homes, and each of these has supported our work in myriad ways: the University of Michigan, Warren Wilson College, Tulane University, the University of Oklahoma, Southern Illinois University–Carbondale, Northwestern Uni-versity, and the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill. Other support and funding for our work in the Spanish compound has come from the National Science Foundation (BCS-0542120); the National Geographic So-

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xviii · Acknowledgments

ciety Committee on Research and Exploration; the National Park Service Certified Local Governments Grant to the City of Morganton, adminis-tered by the North Carolina Division of Archives and History, Depart-ment of Cultural Resources; and the Burke County Historical Society, the Historic Burke Foundation, and the Woodbury Foundation. Finally, the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, hosted several of our project members for a 2009 Research Team Short Seminar, the results of which include this book. Throughout our project, Warren Wilson College has served as our ad-ministrative host institution and supported the Archaeology Work Crew and Laboratory. Dave would especially like to thank Virginia McKinley, Doug Orr, Larry Modlin, John Casey, Ian Richardson, Mary Davis, Steve Solnick, Paula Garrett, Christa Bridgman, and Richard Blomgren for their support. At the University of Michigan, Rob would like to express his thanks to Joyce Marcus and Tom Fricke for all of their encouragement during the writing of this book. Chris acknowledges many supporters at Tulane University, including Will Andrews, Dan Healan, and Kit Nelson. Each field season at Berry, we have been fortunate to work alongside an exemplary staff, without whose commitment and dedication we could not have accomplished what we have. Many thanks to you all:

2002: Scott Ashcraft, Megan Best, Aaron Brummit, Emily Dale, Caro-line Ketron, and James Lang;

2003: Megan Best, Karla Evans, Ellie Haywood, Crickett Hefner, Car-oline Ketron, James Lang, and Jessica Smeeks;

2004: Megan Best, Rachel Briggs, Karla Evans, Crickett Hefner, Jesse Mitchell, and Johanna Vasek;

2005: Megan Best, Rachel Briggs, Will Gulley, Liz Horton, Lotte Go-vaerts, and Lauren Zych;

2006: Jessica Baker, Lotte Govaerts, Crickett Hefner, Liz Horton, Jesse Mitchell, Johanna Vask, and Lauren Zych;

2007: Annie Blankenship, Rachel Briggs, David Cranford, Emily Dale, Elsbeth Dowd, Andrea Glenn, Lotte Govaerts, Lorie Han-son, Crickett Hefner, Liz Horton, Hannah Humphrey, Caroline Ke-tron, Patricia Overman, Emma Richardson, Merritt Sanders, and Johanna Vasek;

2008: Annie Blankenship, Rachel Briggs, Andrea Glenn, Lotte Gov-aerts, Lorie Hanson, David Heavner, Crickett Hefner, Liz Horton, Hannah Humphrey, Caroline Ketron, Elizabeth Martin, Trevor

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Acknowledgments · xix

Martin, Adam Moody, Kevin Moody, Robert Pagnuzzi, Emma Richardson, Laurel Sanders, Merritt Sanders, and Johanna Vasek;

2009: Rachel Briggs, David Cranford, Lorie Hanson, Trevor Martin, Emma Richardson, and Merritt Sanders;

2010: David Cranford, Allyson Gardner, David Heavner, Abra Joh-gart, Caroline Ketron, Theresa McReynolds, Casey Monahan, Kate O’Mara, Emma Richardson, and Merritt Sanders;

2011: Rachel Bissell, Allyson Gardner, Brian Geiger, David Heavner, Abra Johgart, Kat Kipfer, Theresa McReynolds, Casey Monahan, and Emma Richardson;

2012: Rachel Bissell, Jessica Dalton-Carringer, Brian Geiger, David Heavner, Abra Johgart, Kat Kipfer, Shaun Lynch, Theresa McReyn-olds, and Emma Richardson;

2013: David Heavner, Abra Johgart, and Kat Kipfer;2014: Jess Cantrell, David Heavner, Abra Johgart, Kat Kipfer, Caroline

Loveland, and Travis Williams.

In addition, each year the Archaeology Crew at the Warren Wilson Col-lege Archaeology Lab is responsible for washing and cataloguing the field school materials. These undergraduate students have assisted with creating and curating all of our project documentation, maps, and photographs and have also conducted a variety of lab analyses on the Berry material. Their assistance is immeasurable, and we thank them all for helping to sustain the project year after year:

2001–2: Megan Best, Emily Dale, Rachel Horne, Zoey Keefer-Norris, Isabel Salazar, and Will Spoon;

2002–3: Megan Best, Emily Dale, Laurel Key, Michelle Kozma, James Lang, and Rose Orleans;

2003–4: Emily Dale, Laurel Key, James Lang, Rose Orleans, and Jo-hanna Vasek;

2005–6: Candace Anthony, Gretchen Fitzgerald, Andrea Glenn, Will Gulley, Jesse Mitchell, and Johanna Vasek;

2006–7: Lindsay Butenhof, Gretchen Caverly, Andrea Glenn, Lotte Govaerts, Will Gulley, Peter Lanier, Niels Nugent, Emma Richard-son, and Shannon Saville;

2007–8: Andrea Glenn, Niels Nugent, Emma Richardson, and Laurel Sanders;

2008–9: Lindsay Butenhof, Allyson Gardner, Abra Johgart, Niels Nu-gent, Laurel Sanders, and Amy Wagner;

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2009–10: Lindsay Butenhof, Allyson Gardner, Abra Johgart, Casey Monahan, and Kate O’Mara;

2010–11: Allyson Gardner, Abra Johgart, Mary Dawn Kidd, Casey Monahan, and Maureen Vaughn;

2011–12: Helen Albea, Ellie Ferguson, Abra Johgart, Kat Kipfer, Brandy Oliver, and Maureen Vaughn;

2012–13: Mariah Bruce, Eli Clare, Russell DePratter, Fern Hoffmann, Abra Johgart, and Claire Woerner;

2013–14: Russell DePratter, Fern Hoffmann, Abra Johgart, and Caro-line Loveland;

2014–15: Fern Hoffmann, Abra Johgart, and Caroline Loveland.

Our project was conceived from the start as a public archaeology proj-ect. We wanted to find innovative ways to engage more of the public in the actual work as well as to do the best job we could at sharing the results of our explorations with the general public. We have been rewarded and continue to be motivated by the opportunity of working with over five hun-dred field school students ranging from high schoolers to retirees, from vacationing business executives to schoolteachers seeking different ways to share their love of history and intellectual growth with their students. These are the folks who do much of the hard work, and often under challenging conditions. We have enjoyed working with every one of you, and without your efforts we could not have carried out a project of this magnitude. Spurred by the interest and support of a large contingent of friends in Morganton and Burke County, we supported the formation in 2008 of Ex-ploring Joara Foundation Inc. (EJF), a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to support public education and outreach regarding archaeology in the western Piedmont region of North Carolina. We are grateful to all of the EJF membership for their interest and support, and we appreciate their efforts to spread their interest in archaeology to the wider community. We especially enjoy the Annual Field Day sponsored by EJF, when we host five hundred to one thousand visitors at the Berry site to show off the yearly excavations. We have many to thank in Morganton, including the City of Morgan-ton, Western Piedmont Community College, and the Western Piedmont Foundation. We especially wish to thank several individuals who provided critical support throughout the years. Linda Wall was instrumental in our early years of investigations and more recently helped to establish the Carl and Linda Wall Center for Archaeological Research in Morganton. Mary

xx · Acknowledgments

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Charlotte Safford and many other staff, faculty, and administrators at West-ern Piedmont Community College have been ardent field school support-ers, as have many other community members, but we would especially like to thank Larry Clark, Clark and Lee Erwin, Patti Matthias, Janet Wilson, Sam Avery, Jim Richardson, Frank and Shirley Sprinkle, Charles and Alice Carey, and Robert and Nicole Vasile. We also owe a debt of gratitude to our many friends and colleagues in the archaeological community who have generously offered their time, encouragement, advice, wisdom, and careful critiques: David Anderson, Doug Bolender, Tony Boudreaux, Jim Brown, John Chenowith (for sug-gestions regarding the folkloric use of iron), Steve Claggett, Charles Cobb, Steve Davis, Kathy Deagan, Chester DePratter, Tim Earle, Robbie Ethridge, Charles Ewen, Pat Gilman, Dolores Hall, Linda Hall, David Hally, Bennie Keel, T. R. Kidder, Larry Kimball, Jim Knight, Janet Levy, Matt Liebmann, Patrick Livingood, Clay Mathers, Alan May, Maureen Meyers, Paul Min-nis, Jeff Mitchem, Dan Morse, Phyllis Morse, Grady Pitts, Brett Riggs, Matt Schmader, Gerald Schroedl, Scott Shumate, Marvin Smith, Stan South, Vin Steponaitis, David Hurst Thomas, Victor Thompson, Jason Ur, Trawick Ward, Steve Wernke, Tom Whyte, and Mark Williams. We would like to make a special acknowledgment of our friend George Stuart, whose pass-ing in 2014 was a profound loss to each of us; we deeply appreciate the generosity of George and his wife, Melinda, during our visits to Boundary End Farm, their home in Barnardsville, North Carolina. We would like to thank the Catawba Indian Nation, particularly Beckee Garris and Winona Haire of the Catawba Cultural Center. Our wonderful editor, Judy Knight, kept us motivated and focused from the beginning of this book project through to its end, all the while showing patience and continued encouragement as our deadlines came and went. Marvin Smith and Charles Ewen, our readers, offered cogent advice and suggestions for improving the manuscript, and we appreciate both the care-ful reading they gave it and their remarkably speedy turnaround. Finally, our families have seen us through more than a dozen years of fieldwork at the Berry site. They have helped us to pack our bags each sum-mer and then have held down homes in our absence, but just as often they have joined us in the field, our partners and our children alike. Their love for us, and their appreciation for what we do, make it worth doing: Laoma, Soledad, and Cadir Beck; Hope Spencer, Henry, Erik, and Leif Rodning; and Kaitlyn Moore. Our love and thanks to you all for showing us such patience and bringing us such joy.

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I

Joara, Cuenca, and Fort San Juan

Deep in the country north and west of Santa Elena, near an Indian town named Joara, was a place where the trail crested a hill and gave the captain his first glimpse of the rugged lands that lay just ahead. Whatever paths wended up and over those steep slopes would no doubt have been precarious for any men so laden with supplies, even in the best of times, but it was late Decem-ber now, icy and cold, and Pardo shared his company’s disquiet as he regarded the rim of snow-filled mountains on the horizon. They had put a hundred leagues or more behind them already, most of it across fine, open country, but he knew—looking across at the high ridge—that any effort to push beyond its frozen passes with tired, overburdened men would be impractical at best, foolhardy at worst. He was neither. Even so, he would not be bogged down here with so little yet to show for himself. It was nearly dusk. He gave a nod to his sergeant, Moyano, that they should make camp now before night was upon them. In the morning they would arrive at the town the Indians called Joara, and while the company recovered he would take the counsel of his of-ficers before deciding where they should go from there. Standing on the crest of the hill, he was suddenly struck by how much this land in the shadow of the mountains reminded him of Cuenca, of home. He shut his eyes and let himself believe, but for a moment, that the setting sun on his face was that of Castile.

* * *

What strikes you, walking across the Berry site, is how remarkably unassum-ing it is—how unremarkable. It occupies the eastern edge of a field like many

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2 · Part I. Joara, Cuenca, and Fort San Juan

others in the western Piedmont of North Carolina, a wide expanse of rich bot-tomland hemmed in by low uplands, the foothills of the Appalachians. Upper Creek, a tributary of the upper Catawba River as unremarkable in name and appearance as Berry itself, borders the site to both the east and the south, a feat it achieves by making a deep, nearly ninety-degree bend to the west before joining with Irish Creek and flowing on toward the Catawba. The Berry site is bordered on its west by two ornamental tree farms with a cornfield in between; fields both to its north and to its east across Upper Creek are also planted in trees and shrubs. Of all this bottomland at the confluence of Upper and Irish Creeks, more than 200 acres (or 75 hectares), Berry is but a narrow strip that measures about five American football fields in length and just less than one in width, covering an area of 11 acres (or 4.5 hectares). Today, only the lower end of the site is annually plowed for small garden plots of corn, squash, beans, cucumbers, tomatoes, melons, potatoes, and even broccoli. The rest of the site lies fallow. There are no great earthen mounds to climb at the Berry site, no impressive plazas to cross. Compared with some of the better-known, more-photogenic sites in the Eastern Woodlands, you might justifiably walk out onto Berry and think to yourself, there is nothing to see here.

But beneath the surface, out of reach of the plows, the story that the Berry site is telling is, indeed, remarkable. Berry is the site of the southeastern Indian town of Joara, also called Xualla, and it was there—on December 27, 1566, the feast day of Saint John the Evangelist—that the Spanish captain Juan Pardo established Fort San Juan and its adjoining colony of Cuenca, named after his hometown in the province of Castile. Fort San Juan was the first European set-tlement in the interior of what is now the United States. Pardo garrisoned his fort with thirty men, and for much of the eighteen months that followed they enjoyed good relations with their native hosts, who supplied the Spaniards with most of their daily food and provisions. Yet relations between the people of Joara and the men of Fort San Juan had deteriorated badly by the spring of 1568, when the Indians there and at the six other towns across the Caroli-nas and eastern Tennessee where Pardo built forts rose up and destroyed the Spanish garrisons. Never again would Spain attempt to settle the interior of La Florida, a territory that once included most of the American Southeast, creat-ing a vacuum that English settlers would exploit during the centuries to come.

Together, we have explored the archaeology of the Berry site for more than a decade now, focusing much of our attention on the northern end of the site where we first recovered sixteenth-century Spanish ceramics and hardware. Subsequent magnetometry and soil coring here revealed the presence of sev-eral burned buildings and numerous large pit features that seemed to con-

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Part I. Joara, Cuenca, and Fort San Juan · 3

stitute a well-defined architectural compound. Our extensive excavations in these buildings and features have led us to identify this compound as Cuenca, the settlement that housed Pardo’s doomed men stationed at Fort San Juan. What remained elusive was any evidence of fortifications—where was the fort itself? Finally, in an area south of the compound and where we were working during our 2013 field season, we found a long section of dry moat measur-ing 10 feet (3 meters) across and nearly 6 feet (2 meters) deep. . Exploring the features of Fort San Juan—the public face of the colonial encounter—will consume much of our research agenda in the years to come. What we offer in this volume is thus the private face of the encounter, as revealed through our years of work in the Spanish compound. Its features contain the remains of daily life at Cuenca, while its extraordinarily well-preserved buildings reveal much about relations between Indians and Spaniards and how these relations changed over the course of eighteen months. These data provide us an un-paralleled view of household practice on an early colonial frontier. In chapter 1, we summarize Pardo’s two expeditions into the Carolinas, then outline a background to our research at Berry and discuss the research design that has framed this phase of our project.

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1

Introduction


Columbus’s landfall in the Bahamas in 1492 initiated the most dramatic century of cultural exchange in human history. Over two continents, the native peoples of the Americas from Tierra del Fuego to the St. Lawrence River met waves of explorers, settlers, proselytizers, and profiteers from Spanish, English, French, Portuguese, and Dutch centers of colonial aspira-tion. Of all these nations, Spain was by far the most ambitious in its early ef-forts at exploration and conquest (Bray 1993; Deagan 2003; Hoffman 1990; Hudson 1990, 1997; Lyon 1976; Thomas 1991; Thomas, ed. 1989, 1990). Dur-ing the first decades of the sixteenth century, Spain launched several failed attempts to claim the American Southeast. The most famous—or perhaps infamous—of these was the expedition of Hernando de Soto, which cut its ravenous swath across the Southeast from 1539 to 1543. But of the more than six hundred soldiers who began the expedition, more than half—in-cluding Soto himself—would ultimately perish in La Florida. Similarly di-sastrous ventures during this period include the expeditions of Juan Ponce de León (1521), Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón (1526), Pánfilo de Narváez (1528), and Tristán de Luna y Arellano (1559–1560). Finally, after his expulsion of the French from La Florida in 1565–1566, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés successfully founded a pair of small colonies on the South Atlantic coast: San Agustín (modern St. Augustine), founded in September 1565 in what is now northeastern Florida, and Santa Elena, established in April 1566 on modern-day Parris Island, South Carolina. The latter was to be the principal site of Menéndez’s colonial project (Hoffman 1990; Hudson 1990; Lyon 1976; Paar 1999). When Philip II of Spain learned of these developments, he ordered reinforcements for Menéndez’s colony. In July 1566, Captain Juan Pardo, a member of the king’s private guard, ar-rived at Santa Elena with a contingent of 250 men and soon began to fortify

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6 · Robin A. Beck, David G. Moore, and Christopher B. Rodning

Figure 1.1. Route of Juan Pardo’s first expedition, 1566–1567 (after Beck 2013: 71, map 5).

the settlement. Because the Santa Elena colony was not prepared to feed this company of men for very long, Menéndez ordered Pardo to prepare half of his army for an expedition into the interior regions that lay behind the Atlantic coast. His task was to explore the area, to claim its lands for Spain while pacifying local Indians, and to forge an overland road from Santa Elena to the valuable silver mines in Zacatecas, Mexico. Pardo left the colony with 125 men on December 1, 1566, and in the months to follow his army would revisit a small portion of the route that Soto had taken across the Carolinas in 1540 (figure 1.1).

The Juan Pardo Expeditions, 1566–1568

Of this, the first of Pardo’s two expeditions, we have but a single eyewit-ness account—the brief relation written by Pardo himself. This document provides few details about social relations on the Carolina Piedmont in the post-Soto era, other than the names of places that the expedition vis-

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Introduction · 7

ited and how their respective leaders received Pardo and his men. By join-ing Pardo’s account with accounts of the second expedition, however, we can reconstruct a basic itinerary of the first (DePratter et al. 1983; Hudson 1990). After departing Santa Elena, the entrada army traveled north for a few days across South Carolina’s lightly populated inner Coastal Plain. The first town of note was Guiomae, the same place as Soto’s Himahi (Hudson et al. 1984: 72). Two days later, they arrived at the important town of Canos, where Pardo (1990: 311) reported that he “found a great number of caciques and Indians.” Fortunately, Pardo’s scribe, Juan de la Bandera, made two records of the second expedition and noted in the shorter of these that the Indians called this town “Canosi and, for another name, Cofetazque” (Ban-dera 1990b: 301). Thus, the place referred to as Canos in the Pardo accounts is probably the same as Soto’s Cofitachequi, one of the most powerful poli-ties that Soto visited east of the Appalachians. As at most of the towns that Pardo entered, he told the cacique and his subjects to build a house for the expedition and to fill it with maize. Pardo and most of the soldiers who accompanied him into the interior could neither speak nor understand any of the Indian languages they en-countered. For this reason, the expedition was dependent on the translators and interpreters among the company. One of these was Domingo de León, and John Worth devotes chapter 3 of this volume to León’s background and account of the Pardo expeditions. Another was a young Frenchman, Guil-laume Rouffi, whose story was as dramatic as that of any of his fellow ex-plorers (DePratter et al. 1983: 126). In 1562, the sixteen-year-old Rouffi was among the thirty French soldiers Jean Ribault left on modern Parris Island to garrison the newly founded Charlesfort. When winter fell on the fort and the men began to starve, they built a small, crude boat and set sail across the Atlantic; only Rouffi chose to remain behind. Two years later, a Spanish ship’s captain found Rouffi living among the local Orista Indians, having married a daughter of an Orista chief (Rudes 2004: 380). A Huguenot when he left France, Rouffi quickly converted to Catholicism and became Pedro Menéndez’s most trusted interpreter. Pardo continued north from Canos through the Catawba-Wateree Val-ley, pausing briefly at several small towns before leaving the main valley for the South Fork River, where he came to a town called Ysa. “Ysa” is a variant of “Esaw,” the name applied to one of the core peoples of the Ca-tawba Nation in the early eighteenth century, and transposed as “Nassaw” it referred to one of the most important of all Catawba towns (Merrell 1989: 94). Two or three days north of Ysa, Pardo entered the province of Joara,

proof


located along a tributary of the upper Catawba River in the Appalachian foothills. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the upper Catawba River was among the most densely populated regions of the North Carolina Piedmont (chapter 2, this volume; Beck and Moore 2002; Moore 2002). In 1540, Hernando de Soto had passed through this area, and all of the expe-dition accounts refer to its primary town as “Xualla,” a cognate of “Joara” (e.g., Beck 2013: 69–70). Soto’s army stayed at Xualla only two to four days, however, and had little apparent impact on the town. Pardo’s instruction from Menéndez had been to press across the mountains and forge a route to Mexico. At Joara, however, he saw that there was already snow on the peaks that lay ahead (Martínez 1990: 320), so he halted his westward push to continue exploring the Piedmont. Pardo remained at Joara for fifteen days, writing that its people “demanded Christians from me to catechize them” (1990: 312). There, he constructed a fort that he christened Fort San Juan. Because the area reminded him of his home in Spain, he bestowed the name “Cuenca” on both the Indian town of Joara and the new Spanish settlement (see figure 1.5). Pardo marched northeast through the upper Catawba Valley, spending several days at the towns of Guaquiri and Quinahaqui before leaving the Catawba River. After marching east across an unoccupied region between the Catawba and Yadkin Rivers, he and his men arrived at Guatari, prob-ably located in the central Yadkin Valley near modern-day Salisbury, North Carolina. Pardo (1990: 312) found thirty caciques and many Indians waiting to meet with the company at Guatari, a clear sign of this town’s prominence. By the early 1700s, a greatly reduced Guatari (known to the English as Wa-tery) had moved to the lower Wateree Valley, giving this river its name. Pardo stayed at Guatari for just over two weeks, hastily departing when he received news of a possible French military threat to Santa Elena. He left four of his soldiers and the company cleric, Father Sebastian Montero, to catechize the Indians, and it was there that Montero established the earli-est mission in the interior of North America (Gannon 1965). Pardo and his remaining army went back to the Catawba-Wateree Valley and passed through several villages south of what is now the line that divides modern-day North and South Carolina before returning to Canos; they arrived in Santa Elena on March 7, 1567 (Bandera 1990a: 259). In the six months that Pardo was at Santa Elena, Hernando Moyano—sergeant at Fort San Juan—led devastating attacks on at least two native towns in the Appalachians that were probably enemies of Joara (figure 1.2). Our knowledge of Moyano’s two assaults derives from an account by

proof

Introduction · 9

Francisco Martínez, written in July 1567 between Pardo’s first and second expeditions. Thirty days after Pardo made his return to Santa Elena, Moy-ano sent news claiming that he had defeated “a cacique . . . named Chisca” (Martínez 1990: 320). He wrote, according to Martínez, that he had killed more than a thousand Chisca Indians and burned fifty huts, though the former number is probably exaggerated (Hudson 1990: 48). He also sug-gested that he could “press further on” if commanded to do so (Martínez 1990: 320). But before Pardo’s orders could arrive, Moyano and his men were accosted by “a cacique of the mountains” who vowed to eat the Span-iards and “a dog the sergeant had” (Martínez 1990: 320). Departing at once, Moyano and nineteen of his soldiers, accompanied by a party of warriors from Joara (Hudson 1990: 48), marched for four days across the mountains, where they were surprised to find “the enemies . . . enclosed by a very high wooden wall” (Martínez 1990: 320). After breaching the palisade, they

Figure 1.2. Hernando Moyano’s forays in the Appalachian Mountains, 1567 (after Beck 2013: 77, map 6).

proof


burned the town and, again, according to Martínez, killed 1,500 Indians; this figure, too, was likely exaggerated (Hudson 1990: 48). Until recently, Martínez’s account was our only source describing Moy-ano’s foray in 1567. But John Worth’s discovery of a 1584 account by Do-mingo de León, a translator who participated in Pardo’s second expedition, offers a link between Martínez’s account and the testimony of Luisa Mén-dez and Juan de Ribas before Governor Gonzalo Méndez de Canço at St. Augustine in 1600. Luisa Méndez, who was a native woman taken from the interior during Pardo’s second expedition, reported that there were three to five saltwater springs at the base of the mountains. She described how this salt was processed and recalled that these were the only such springs in all of that land (Hudson 1990: 87). Juan de Ribas, a member of the second expedition who was likely stationed at Joara, testified that Méndez, his wife, was the cacica of Guanaytique, also known as Manaytique (Hudson 1990: 190, 201). Significantly, Domingo de León notes that “Maniatique” and “Guapere” were the mountain villages assaulted and destroyed by Moyano in 1567 (Worth, chapter 3, this volume). Maniatique was likely located along the North Fork of the Holston River near present-day Saltville, Virginia (Beck 1997a). The Saltville locale was one of the most important brines in the American South and one of just three where rock salt is available (Barber and Barfield 2000). An “Indian path” illustrated on the Fry-Jefferson Map of 1751 extends from the upper Holston to the upper Catawba Valley. This path is similarly marked on the 1770 Collet and 1775 Mouzon maps (e.g., Cumming 1966: 23–27). Also, Michael Barber and Eugene Barfield (2000) propose that the Chilhowie High School site (44SM8) was the central town of a “petty chiefdom” in the Saltville locale. Sixteenth-century shell gorgets have been identified in local collections, as have other exotic goods (Barber and Barfield 2000; Wedel 1951: 115, 121). While this location of Maniatique does depend on the assumption that the springs noted by Méndez were located within the bounds of her territory (that is, Maniatique), it seems unlikely that Mén-dez, a young woman when taken from the interior, would have had such detailed knowledge of a distant brine. After defeating the second of these villages, probably located along the upper Nolichucky or Watagua River in present-day eastern Tennessee, Moyano left along “the road of a great chief that was in that head of the mountain range, who is called Chiaha” (Martínez 1990: 320). In four days’ time, he and his men arrived at a town of Chiaha. Located between “two heavily flowing rivers,” this town was defended by a palisade. Within “were

proof

Introduction · 11

more than three thousand warriors . . . [and] no other persons, neither women nor children” (Martínez 1990: 320). Although the number of native warriors here is probably exaggerated, Soto met a comparably sized native force at Mabila (Biedma 1993: 233). In any event, Moyano encountered no hostility. Instead, the inhabitants gave Moyano and his company “lots to eat” (Martínez 1990: 320). This outlying town of Chiaha was situated near the junction of the French Broad and either the Nolichucky or the Pigeon River. Moyano left this town by a road “to that chief already mentioned [that is, Chiaha]” (Martínez 1990: 320), and two days later he entered the principal town of that chief. There he quickly built a small fort and waited for Pardo to begin his second expedition. Pardo left again from Santa Elena at Menéndez’s command on Septem-ber 1, 1567, taking 120 soldiers. As noted, the second expedition was accom-panied by an official scribe, Juan de la Bandera, who kept two accounts of the march (figure 1.3); the longer of these is especially useful because of the

Figure 1.3. Towns visited by Juan Pardo’s second expedition, 1567–1568 (after Beck 2013: 79, map 7).

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data it offers on interpolity relations in the Piedmont (Beck 2013). Pardo returned to Canos (Cofitachequi) on September 10. Bandera notes that an impressive group of oratas were awaiting Pardo at Canos and that all of these had helped to build a large house for the Spaniards there or else had provided some maize. In the longer of his two accounts, Bandera distin-guishes between the terms mico and orata: while the latter refers to a town headman—he recorded no fewer than 120 oratas during the second expe-dition—the former applied only to a native leader with regional authority (e.g., Hudson 1990: 63). In fact, Bandera explicitly observes that mico was the term used for great lords (un gran señor) and that orata referred to lesser lords (un menor señor) (Bandera 1990a: 215). He recorded only three micos in his longer account of the expedition: Joara Mico, Guatari Mico, and Olamico (Chiaha). Thus, there was no mico present at Cofitachequi in 1567, though this was the only town in the Carolina Piedmont to which Soto had applied the term in 1540. Still, Canos was an important place, given that at least thirteen oratas met there to receive Pardo, including chiefs from Ylasi, Ve-hidi, Ysa, and Cataba (Bandera 1990a: 260). Ylasi is perhaps the Ylapi of the Soto accounts, to which one of Soto’s officers, Baltasar de Gallegos, led most of the men of the expedition to take some maize that belonged to the cacica of Cofitachequi. Ylasi seems not to have been a subject of Canos in 1567, for while its orata did want credit for helping to build the house for the Spaniards there, he was keeping his maize contribution in a house he had built for that purpose in his own town (Bandera 1990a: 261). “Vehidi” may refer to the people whom the English knew as the Pee Dee Indians (Hudson 1990: 77), who left their name to the Pee Dee River. Two oth-ers—the aforementioned Ysa Orata and the one named Cataba—were key constituents of Catawba coalescence during the eighteenth century; Ban-dera’s account actually represents the first documented use of “Catapa”—a cognate of “Catawba,” a name that would come to represent most Carolina Piedmont peoples after 1720. Pardo’s company continued north from Canos and visited several towns—Tagaya, Gueça, Aracuchi, and Otari—on the lower reaches of the Catawba River, just north of the Fall Line. Each of these towns was a sub-ject of Cofitachequi in 1540, but whether any remained so in 1567 is un-clear. In any event, each had built its own house for Pardo. In fact, all of the towns that the army visited on the Wateree and Catawba Rivers built similar houses for the expedition, suggesting that all viewed the entrada as an opportunity to demonstrate their relative autonomy from other towns

proof

Introduction · 13

(Beck et al. 2010). After leaving Otari, Pardo and his men traveled through an uninhabited stretch of the lower and middle Catawba before resting at Quinahaqui and Guaquiri. At Quinahaqui, Pardo again received the lead-ers of Ysa and Cataba, as well as another whose name, Uchiri (Usheree or Ushery), may identify a community of Yuchian speakers in the Carolina Piedmont. On September 24, Pardo arrived at Joara, where he learned that Moyano “was gone from the fort . . . and that the Indians had him under siege” (Pardo 1990: 313–314). Fearing for Moyano’s outnumbered contingent, he departed at once for Chiaha, leaving Corporal Lucas de Canicares in com-mand of Fort San Juan. Bandera writes that the company marched for three days before they came to a town called Tocae, “a place which is over the top of the ridge [of mountains]” (Bandera 1990a: 266). Chester DePratter and colleagues (1983: 143) suggest that Pardo and his men crossed into the Blue Ridge Mountains at Swannanoa Gap and that Tocae was located near the modern city of Asheville. Pardo stopped at Tocae for just four hours. The following day, October 2, he came to Cauchi, located along the Pigeon River, where he met with several leaders from Cherokee towns to the south and southwest (Hudson 1990: 97). After leaving Cauchi, Pardo marched northwest through the Pigeon River Gap into what is now eastern Tennessee. On October 7, the expedi-tion finally arrived at Olamico, the principal town of Chiaha, where they discovered that Moyano and his contingent were “hard pressed” but safe (Pardo 1990: 314). On October 13, the reunited army departed Olamico. Three days later, at a town called Satapo, Pardo learned of a plot to ambush the expedition, and after conferring with his officers, he decided to turn back. At Olamico, he established Fort San Pedro, where he left twenty-seven men. At Cauchi, he founded Fort San Pablo with eleven men (Ban-dera 1990a: 269–278). Finally, on November 6, he and his reduced expedi-tion arrived at Joara, “where he made a halt and remained twenty days because the people of his company were tired and poorly provided, that they might have a place to rest and to provide themselves” (Bandera 1990a: 277). While the company rested, no fewer than twenty-five oratas and their mandadores, or principal men, came to see Pardo at Joara, a clear sign of the burgeoning status enjoyed by this chiefdom and its leader, Joara Mico. These visiting oratas arrived at Joara in three groups. In the first were lead-ers from the aforementioned villages of Quinahaqui, Guaquiri, Catape (or Cataba), and Ysa Chiquito (Bandera 1990a: 277), the latter apparently a

proof


hamlet of Ysa. In the second party were eighteen caciques of towns whose locations are unknown. Some of these chiefs had met with Pardo at Cauchi as he was returning across the Appalachians, and Charles Hudson (1990: 88–89) suggests that these leaders may have traveled to Joara from Chero-kee towns on the upper Broad, Saluda, and Savannah Rivers. It is also pos-sible that some of these oratas came from Burke phase towns on the upper Catawba and Yadkin Rivers. Bandera does specifically write that five of the oratas in this group were “caciques of ” Joara Mico (Bandera 1990a: 278), such that their towns likely formed the core of the Joara polity (Beck and Moore 2002: 201). Finally, just before the army left Joara, two leaders named Chara Orata and Adini Orata—though nominally subjects of Gua-tari—came to switch their allegiances to Joara. To prevent conflict between the Guatari and Joara polities, Pardo convinced these men to continue giv-ing their obedience in the place they were accustomed. Before departing from Joara, Pardo outfitted Fort San Juan with more materials—and with a broader range of supplies—than any of the other garrisons. He again manned the fort with thirty soldiers but made Alberto Escudero de Villamar its commander and gave him authority over all of the forts between Chiaha and Santa Elena; together, these actions clearly indicate that Pardo conceived of Fort San Juan as the most important of his scattered outposts. Pardo and the rest of his company left on November 24, marching south toward Ysa. Along the way, they made numerous halts to investigate crystal mines that some of the soldiers at Joara, including the newly demoted Moyano and a silversmith named Andrés Suarez, had begun to work during the months they were stationed at Fort San Juan (Bandera 1990a: 279–283). In fact, Bandera goes to great lengths in his long relation to establish which men of the company had a legal claim to these mines should they prove to contain valuable gems. Juan de Ribas, a mem-ber of the second expedition who provided testimony before the governor of La Florida in 1602, recalled that the Spaniards at Fort San Juan gambled for “tiny diamonds” they collected near the fort (Hudson 1990: 163). While these stones were only quartz, such tales nourished the enduring myth of Los Diamantes, a fabled mountain of diamonds in the interior (Hudson 1990: 189). After a long pause at Ysa, where Pardo and the company stayed for some two weeks, they finally arrived at the town of Guatari on December 15. As with the Cofitachequi chiefdom when Soto passed through the Carolinas in 1540, the mico at Guatari was a woman. Thus, two of the three micos who met with Soto and Pardo in the Carolinas were women. On his arrival,

proof

Introduction · 15

Pardo told the cacica to summon her subjects to help the Spaniards build a fort. Bandera’s list of formal gifts that Pardo made that day indicates that seven of the subject oratas came at her behest (Bandera 1990a: 284). While this number might seem low, it is quite close to the number of local head-men that Bandera describes as “caciques of ” Joara Mico. Pardo completed Fort Santiago on January 6 and stationed sixteen men there. He left the next day with the rest of his army and marched for five days before reaching Aracuchi, located along the lower Catawba River. They then turned east and made a detour to the Pee Dee River and the aforementioned town of Ylasi, arriving there in five days. Heavy rain delayed the departure, but they left for Canos on January 21, arriving on January 23. Pardo stayed there for eighteen days, during which time he built Fort Santo Tomás and left it gar-risoned with thirty men (Bandera 1990a: 292). After leaving Canos and the Carolina Piedmont, he made a strong house at the Coastal Plain town of Orista, then returned to Santa Elena with less than a dozen men on March 2, 1568. Shortly after Pardo’s arrival at Santa Elena, relations between these forts and their Indian hosts took a deadly turn for the worse. By May 1568, news reached Santa Elena that Indians had attacked all of the interior forts and that all had fallen. Whether all of these forts were surprised at the same time, in an action prefiguring the well-known Pueblo Revolt of 1680, is un-clear, but clearly none remained by June 1568 (Hudson 1990: 176). Among the several factors that appear to have had a role in the Indians’ decision to destroy the garrisons, two stand out: the Spaniards’ demands for food and their improprieties with Indian women. With respect to the provisioning of the forts, there was apparently a great deal of miscommunication between Spaniards and Indians about the presentation of food. By May 1568, the soldiers at the forts may have had few trade goods left to give in exchange for maize and the other foodstuffs they obtained from their hosts, and it is quite significant that Bandera’s detailed lists of supplies that Pardo left at each fort make no specific mention of trade goods (though some of the chisels listed among the garrison’s supplies may have continued to serve this purpose for a time; see table 8.4). From the Spaniards’ perspective, this was as it should be. The native peoples of the Piedmont were now their subjects, and as such they owed the Spanish Crown—and these men who served as its military stand-ins—continued sustenance as tax or trib-ute. And yet from the Indians’ perspective, Pardo’s soldiers were no longer fulfilling their end of this exchange relationship, and hence they owed the Spaniards nothing.

proof


Sexual politics also seems to have played a significant role in the forts’ de-struction. Before the army left from Guatari, for example, Bandera (1990a: 285) notes that Pardo “commanded him [the corporal placed in charge of Fort Santiago] in the name of His Majesty . . . that no one should dare bring any woman into the fort at night and that he should not depart from the command under pain of being severely punished.” However, Teresa Martín, an Indian woman taken back to Santa Elena on Pardo’s second expedition who was the wife of Juan Martín de Badajoz—who somehow managed to survive the attack on the forts—testified before Governor Canço in 1600 that the men waited “three or four moons” for Pardo to return to the inte-rior. When he failed to do so, they had begun to commit improprieties with native women, angering their men (Hudson 1990: 176). A Jesuit priest, Juan Rogel, blamed the destruction of Pardo’s garrisons on the Spaniards’ continued mistreatment of their hosts. In a letter to Ha-vana dated July 25, 1568, Rogel notes, “[S]ince I intended to learn the Indi-ans’ dispositions, the Captain [Pardo] took me to a town called Escamacú, five leagues distant from [Santa Elena]” (quoted in Ugarte 1935: 85). Im-mediately upon their arrival, Pardo had to appease the townspeople for “certain wrongs” inflicted by soldiers stationed nearby at Fort Orista. But that night, he reported,

We heard the outcries of some Oristan Indian women who were im-ploring the garrison at Escamacú to restrain the soldiers who had raided Oristan and captured it. As we happened to be present, the Captain sent a soldier of our company to reprehend them. . . . This is why I suspect that the forts were lost and our soldiers slain because of the ill-treatment given by our troops. If they wrong them while their Captain was so near what would they not do when they were inland two hundred leagues away from him? (quoted in Ugarte 1935: 85)

Whatever the combination of causes, all six of Pardo’s garrisons and most of the men he stationed along his path were lost, and with them was lost Spain’s only attempt to colonize the deep interior of La Florida. Indeed, this loss precipitated the shrinking of Spanish claims across the Southeast. Ajacán, a place that English settlers would later name Virginia, was lost in 1571 following a brief and disastrous attempt at missionization. Santa Elena was finally abandoned in 1587, after which Spain’s southeastern territory was largely restricted to St. Augustine and the boundaries of present-day Florida. No other Europeans, however, would travel so far into the south-ern interior until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. For nearly 450

proof

Introduction · 17

years, the remnants of Joara and Fort San Juan lay buried in the field that we now know as the Berry site. But how have we been able to identify this site as the town of Joara and its compound of burned buildings as Pardo’s Cuenca? Here we need to recount the confluence of scholarship and good timing that brought us all to the Berry site and allowed us to recognize the archaeological signature of the long-lost colony.

Anchoring Spanish Entradas in the American Southeast

Spanish entradas under the leadership of Hernando de Soto (1539–1543), Tristan de Luna (1559–1560), and Juan Pardo (1566–1567) all produced sev-eral descriptions of Late Mississippian chiefdoms in the American South-east. Until recently, though, it was difficult to make the most of these ac-counts because historians and archaeologists were unable to anchor these descriptions to the cultural geography of the precolonial South with any real accuracy. In 1939, John Swanton, who was among the foremost ethnologists of his era, completed what was at the time the most detailed reconstruction of Soto’s long path ever undertaken. But southeastern archaeology was still in its infancy as a discipline when Swanton was tracing Soto’s route, and because his reconstruction made little use of archaeological data, it was not convincingly tied to the sixteenth-century landscape of native towns and polities that these Spanish explorers described. Then, in the early 1980s, Charles Hudson and his colleagues at the Uni-versity of Georgia and the University of Florida began the project of com-bining the documentary and archaeological records, knowing that their effort provided the best means of linking the precolonial world to the Na-tive South of the eighteenth century. Hudson’s group used a hitherto little known narrative of the second Pardo expedition to reconstruct the Span-iard’s route with great precision (DePratter et al. 1983; Hudson 1990). While they were not the first to realize that Pardo had followed much of the same path that Soto’s army had used to cross the Piedmont in 1540, this detailed account—the long report of Juan de la Bandera—offered an important link reconstructing the Soto path, as well. By this time archaeologists had es-tablished better cultural chronologies for most of the Southeast, so that Hudson and his team could finally situate these early Spanish documents in archaeological space. This allowed them to connect specific towns and chiefdoms named in these accounts with archaeological sites and cultural complexes (Hudson 1990, 1997; Hudson et al. 1985). Three lines of evidence proved especially useful for tracing the routes of

proof


early expeditions such as those of Soto and Pardo (e.g., Beck 2013: 65–66). First, of course, are accounts written by expedition members. Such accounts offer invaluable details about how far an expedition traveled on a particular day; describe physiographic features such as streams, swamps, and moun-tain passes; and record the names of indigenous towns and note their geo-graphic relationships both to these landscape features and to one another. Yet the distance traveled in a day may be deceiving to exhausted soldiers marching through dangerous, rough, and unfamiliar country. Moreover, our understanding of these distances now depends on knowing which unit of measure the writer used. And while many early route historians used the recorded names of native towns and their known eighteenth-century locations to trace the routes of sixteenth-century Spaniards, we now know that these towns moved frequently, and sometimes across large distances, during the first two or three centuries of the colonial era. Later sources should be considered poor guides to sixteenth-century town and polity locations until they are proven otherwise. We must therefore turn to ar-chaeology for corroborating evidence of Spanish explorations across the Carolina Piedmont. Explorers such as Soto and Pardo carried specific kinds of goods—par-ticularly glass beads strung into necklaces, brass or copper bells, and iron knives and chisels—to use as gifts for Indian leaders who provided sup-port to the Crown. Some of these goods are temporally diagnostic, such that their recovery on a site can help to date it to the period of these early expeditions (e.g., Smith 1987, 2000). Yet native leaders traveled long dis-tances to obtain items of European manufacture from the Soto and Pardo expeditions, such that the identification of these sorts of trade goods at a site need not mean that it was directly along the Spaniards’ path. More convincing are items such as European ceramics, nails, lead shot and gun parts, crossbow bolts, and fragments of armor that rarely entered exchange relationships between Spaniards and native groups but instead suggest the actual presence of Europeans at a site. Finally, the distribution of Native American towns and villages offers a key line of evidence in reconstructing the paths of Spanish expeditions. The Soto and Pardo accounts alike refer to large, concentrated populations in many parts of their respective routes, and indeed, each expedition was dependent on such populations for their basic subsistence needs. The dependence of the Spanish expeditions on na-tive food supplies, particularly on maize, means that where these Spaniards marched was entirely dependent on where native peoples lived—specifi-cally, where they resided in sufficient numbers to have large stores of sur-

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Introduction · 19

plus maize that the expeditions could appropriate, whether by persuasion or by force. Although the research done by Hudson’s group revived debate among scholars throughout the region traversed by these expeditions, in few places did the revisions offered by Hudson and his colleagues require as complete a redrawing of earlier efforts as in the southern Appalachians and adjacent parts of the Piedmont. The distinctions between what have come to be re-ferred to as the Swanton Route and the Hudson Route through this place hinged on whether Soto and Pardo entered the Appalachians via the up-per Savannah River (Swanton) or via the upper Catawba (Hudson). Just as Hudson was beginning to spearhead the effort to reconstruct a more accu-rate route, archaeological research in the Savannah Valley (e.g., Anderson 1994) was suggesting an absence of sixteenth-century towns and villages such as those reported in accounts of the Spanish expeditions. At the same time, the Catawba Valley was virtually a terra incognita, with archaeolo-gists unable even to say whether a Native American population lived in the valley during the mid-sixteenth century; identifying sites such as the native towns of Ysa, Guaquiri, and Joara seemed a remote possibility, if at-tainable at all. It was with the goal of testing Hudson’s Catawba hypothesis and developing a knowledge of the valley’s late precolonial population that David Moore began excavations at the McDowell and Berry sites as part of his dissertation field research in 1986 (Moore 2002). Hudson understood that any confirmation of town locations by archae-ologists would offer a critical linchpin for his redrawn map of the sixteenth-century South. He and his colleagues had suggested that the McDowell site (31MC41), located near Marion, North Carolina, was the town of Joara (De Soto’s Xualla). Moore therefore intended to focus his project on the McDowell site, but—because of unforeseen circumstances—he spent more time at the Berry site (31BK22, figure 1.4), about 20 miles (40 kilometers) east of Marion near present Morganton. This seemingly unfortunate turn of events would prove in time to be a boon. In the end, Moore excavated extensively at each site, and although he was unable to confirm that either was the location of Joara, he did show that both were large towns with earthen mounds and that the upper Catawba River valley had a substantial late precolonial population that was consistent both with descriptions in the Spanish accounts and with Hudson’s Catawba hypothesis (e.g., Levy et al. 1990; Moore 2002). In 1994, two independently unfolding events would confirm the gen-eral path of Hudson’s revised route and suggest that Berry, not McDowell,

proof


Figure 1.4. Berry site excavations in 1986, looking north. The Spanish compound is in the upper right portion of the image.

was the location of Joara and Fort San Juan. First, as noted, John Worth’s (see chapter 3, this volume) translation of Domingo de León’s account of-fered a detailed description of the route taken by Pardo and his company, a description that only matches a course through the Catawba-Wateree Valley. Second, Moore and Robin Beck reported the discovery of sixteenth-century Spanish pottery and hardware from the Berry site (see chapter 9, this volume). During surface reconnaissance of Berry in early 1994, Beck had discovered several sherds of olive jar and a wrought iron nail in the general area of Moore’s 1986 excavations. As a result, Beck and Moore re-examined the 1986 collections and identified additional sherds of olive jar, as well as molten lead sprue. Subsequent visits to the site yielded more olive jar sherds and a single fragment of Caparra Blue majolica, found on New World sites that date to the period from 1492 to 1600 (Deagan 1987: 92). This assemblage of Spanish artifacts from the Berry site closely matches the list of supplies that Bandera reported were left for the soldiers at Fort San Juan. The only other site in the interior Southeast with a similar assem-blage of early Spanish artifacts is the Governor Martin site in present-day downtown Tallahassee, Florida, the location of Soto’s winter camp in 1539

proof

Introduction · 21

at Apalachee (e.g., Ewen and Hann 1998). At the Southeastern Archaeologi-cal Conference, Moore and Beck (1994) identified Berry as the site of Joara and Fort San Juan, a location that fell within about 20 miles of the site that Hudson and his colleagues had proposed in 1983. The identification of Berry as Joara spurred Beck (1997b) to revisit the routes of Soto and Pardo across the Appalachian Summit. Specifically, if Berry was Joara, then the Spaniards likely traveled into the mountains by different routes, with Soto taking a northern course from Berry into the Nolichucky drainage and Pardo taking a westerly course into the French Broad drainage through the Swannanoa Gap. In 1996, as a part of his mas-ter’s project at the University of Alabama, Beck (1997a) conducted a sys-tematic archaeological survey of Upper Creek/Warrior Fork, the tributary of the upper Catawba on which the Berry site is located. This survey iden-tified five large sites or site pairs that seem to have been contemporane-ous with Berry (see chapter 2, this volume). In 1997, Beck and Thomas Hargrove conducted a gradiometer survey of Berry that revealed evidence of at least four large subsurface anomalies believed to represent the re-mains of burned buildings; auger tests confirmed the presence of burned materials in discrete areas corresponding to the anomalies. And in 2001, Moore, Beck, and Christopher Rodning—then a doctoral student study-ing Cherokee archaeology in southwestern North Carolina—established a joint archaeological project and began new excavations at Berry to expose the site areas thought to contain the remains of Fort San Juan (Beck et al. 2006; Moore et al. 2004). This work would soon lead us into the household archaeology of a colonial encounter.

Household Practice at Cuenca and Fort San Juan

Stephen Silliman (2005) has proposed disentangling the concepts of culture contact and colonialism in historical archaeology. He suggests that while the term contact may be suitable for initial or first encounters, the term colonialism better suits long-term contexts of interaction between Europe-ans and the native peoples of North America. Initial European contact, as such, occurred in North Carolina during May 1540, when the Hernando de Soto expedition marched across the Carolina Piedmont. We conceive the founding, occupation, and ultimate destruction of Fort San Juan—which took place from 1566 to 1568—as constituting a colonial encounter, during which the native peoples of the upper Catawba Valley engaged in daily, sus-tained interaction and exchange with representatives of a colonial power.

proof


This encounter informs the broader processes of colonialism, especially with respect to similar frontier and borderland settings. Archaeologists have moved away from unidirectional studies of accul-turation, focused on how indigenous groups passively accepted elements of European culture, toward more-balanced and agent-centered approaches that conceptualize the myriad ways by which both Europeans and native peoples actively negotiated identity in colonial settings (Cusick 1998; Dea-gan 1983, 2003, 2004; Ewen 1991; Lightfoot 1995; Lightfoot et al. 1998; Scott 1990; Silliman 2005; Voss 2008). Kathleen Deagan (2003: 8) notes, for ex-ample, with respect to the Spanish Empire, that “the goals of establishing civilized Christian life as dictated by the Church and the Crown were ap-parently adjusted most strikingly (and perhaps even largely ignored) in rural and frontier areas of the empire. . . . In fact, there is some indication that the Spaniards who lived in these communities made far greater adjust-ments to the American mode of life than vice versa.” While Gil Stein (1998, 1999) focuses his distance parity model of inter-regional interaction on commodity exchange between “core” regions and their peripheries, we believe that this model has broader implications for colonial exchange along frontiers, including those that Deagan discusses in the passage quoted above. Distance parity, a recent alternative to world system approaches that assume cultural hegemony in core-periphery rela-tions, posits that the ability of a “core” region to project its power and cul-tural influence into peripheries diminishes with distance, leading to more-symmetrical exchange relations (Stein 1998: 229). As Deagan’s passage suggests, conventionally expected patterns of exchange—both of material commodities and of cultural practices—may actually be less symmetrical than reversed in frontier settlements such as Fort San Juan. That is, the more distant or isolated a colony is from its “core” (or from fellow colonies), the more dependent it will be on exchange and interaction with local in-digenous groups, assuming relative technological and organizational parity between the settlers and their native hosts. Along frontiers, households are particularly well-suited to provide ar-chaeological data on colonial encounters (e.g., Deagan 1983, 1985a, 2004; Ewen 1991; Hoffman 1990; Lightfoot et al. 1998; McEwan 1995; McEwan, ed. 1993). Kent Lightfoot and colleagues note, “From an archaeological per-spective, we believe the study of change and persistence in multi-ethnic contexts pertaining to the construction of social identities may be best ad-dressed by considerations of daily practices involving domestic life and the organization of space” (1998: 202). In light of this, our archaeological re-

proof

Introduction · 23

search at the Berry site has thus far emphasized the excavation and analysis of household contexts at Fort San Juan, specifically within the architectural complex that we refer to throughout this volume as the Spanish compound (figure 1.5). Today, this compound consists of five burned buildings and dozens of features, but the men of Fort San Juan would have passed much of their time there: it was where they slept, took their meals, developed personal relationships with one another and with the men and women of Joara, and followed the habitual, routine practices of daily life. We have designed our research—both its field and its laboratory analyses—with re-spect to three domains of household practice: (1) house construction, (2) household organization, and (3) food preparation and consumption (e.g., Lightfoot et al. 1998: 209–215). Our particular questions inform these three broad domains and together address our key problem: how did these Span-iards and their native hosts construct and maintain social relations through household practice?

Domain 1: House Construction

1. How was the labor of house construction organized?2. What kinds of material culture were used to build and maintain

houses?3. What kinds of techniques and practices were used to build and

maintain houses?4. In what season(s) of the year were houses built?

Because of their unusual state of preservation, the burned buildings at Berry offer unparalleled opportunities to investigate materials and techniques of house construction on a Spanish colonial frontier during the mid-sixteenth century. Detailed analysis of timbers and architectural furniture permit us to determine the season of year that these structures were built, the types of wood used for different structural elements, the kinds of tools used to prepare and shape materials (such as metal versus stone tools), and the materials used to join different elements (for example, nails). The Pardo accounts suggest that Spaniards built the fort, while native Joarans built at least one of the associated houses. However, our research suggests that both Spanish and native construction practices were incorporated in the buildings we have excavated so far. Our evidence on house construction thus sheds light on whether Spaniards and Joarans worked together on the same buildings or their work parties were culturally segregated.

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Introduction · 25

Domain 2: Household Organization

5. What kinds of activities took place in and around houses?6. How were household activity areas spatially organized?7. What kinds of material culture were incorporated into household

contexts?8. How did gender mediate the organization of household activity

areas?

Spanish soldiers lived at Fort San Juan for eighteen months, until its de-struction, and each of the burned buildings there likely housed several sol-diers throughout this period. Excavation and analysis of undisturbed house floors and outdoor features provide data on how early colonial Spaniards incorporated native lifeways into their daily routines and practices. These house floors and features also provide evidence about gender relations at Fort San Juan, particularly the extent to which native women participated in household activities inside the compound. Throughout the Spanish Americas, native women were, as Deagan (2003: 8) observes, “a potent force” in the integration of Spanish and native communities; indeed, Span-iards made some of their most significant adjustments to American life in household settings, guided by the practices of indigenous women (Deagan 1983, 1995, 2003; Ewen 1991; McEwan 1991a; Reitz and McEwan 1995). The accounts of the Pardo expeditions hint at relations between native women and Spanish soldiers stationed at the interior forts, and some of Pardo’s soldiers later married Indian women taken to Santa Elena at the end of the second expedition. One of these, Teresa Martín, gave official testimony in 1600 that when Pardo did not return to the interior forts within “three or four moons,” some of his men began to commit indiscretions with local women, angering their men (Hudson 1990: 176). Martín was identified as a native of “Juacan” (Joara) and was married to one of the thirty soldiers left at Fort San Juan after Pardo’s first expedition, Juan Martín de Badajoz; Hudson (1990: 176) suggests that they may have married at Joara and so perhaps lived together in Fort San Juan.

Domain 3: Food Preparation and Consumption

9. Where did food preparation activities take place?10. What kinds of food were prepared and consumed in household

contexts?11. What kinds of material culture were used in food preparation and

consumption?

proof


12. How were the wastes associated with food preparation and con-sumption discarded?

Many of our specialist analyses focus on food, food preparation, and food serving remains from floor and pit feature contexts. Food is one of the key means through which people maintain their social identities. These specialist analyses, together with detailed contextual data, permit us to ex-amine how Pardo’s soldiers provisioned themselves while occupying the fort, as well as the degree to which they received provisioning from the town of Joara. They also shed light on the kinds of food consumed in the fort and the kinds of tools used in food preparation. Furthermore, different kinds of food were associated with different preparation and consumption practices. Some foods were prepared by Joaran women within the Spanish compound, others by Joaran men outside the compound, and some by the soldiers themselves.

* * *

Too often in archaeology, the nature of our evidence demands that we pres-ent the colonial encounter as a homogenous clash of cultures. Rarely can we disentangle the individual decisions, practices, and actions that con-stitute the encounter from those palimpsests of decisions, practices, and actions that constitute the archaeological record. It is here that our volume on Joara and Fort San Juan offers significant insights about how such en-counters actually unfold, in decisions about which woods and tools to use in building a house; about which foods to prepare and consume (or which to withhold); about which things to bring and which to leave as you embark on the march to a foreign land. Yet Berry provides more than a snapshot of the eighteen months that Pardo’s men occupied Joara. Instead, the tem-poral resolution that we have identified in the archaeology of the Spanish compound offers something akin to a moving picture, or as close to such as we can likely hope to see in an archaeological context. This book thus draws on the tools of scientific analysis and historical narrative. We present our data to tell a story, one that we hope will be of interest to all scholars of colonialism and empire—archaeologists and historians alike.

proof

Fort San Juan and the Limits of Empire: Colonialism and Household Practice at the Berry Site.

Documents

Transcript of Fort San Juan and the Limits of Empire: Colonialism and Household Practice at the Berry Site.