Timucua is the name of a number of Native American groups who spoke the Timucua language and lived in what is today the southeastern United States. Scholars do not consider Timucua-speaking groups to have made up just one ethnic group. Timucua peoples lived in what is now northern Florida and southeastern Georgia. Up to 200,000 Timucua once lived in this broad area. Disease and conflicts with European colonists eventually led to the collapse of Timucua societies. By the late 1700’s, few Timucua remained in their homelands.
Ways of life
Timucua societies were organized as simple, politically independent chiefdoms. Chiefs were called holata in the Timucua language. Later, the Spanish referred to them as cacique << kah SEE keh >> . Men and women from particular clans could inherit chiefdoms matrilineally (through the mother’s family line). They were typically members of the White Deer Clan. Each chief ruled over multiple communities and over less powerful village chiefs. French colonists originally recorded the name Timucua as Thimogona or Tymangoua, in reference to one particular chiefdom. Over time, the term was used by colonial authorities to refer to all of the chiefdoms united by the common language Timucua.
Timucua-speaking groups traded goods with one another and with other southeastern Native American peoples. They shared many customs with these peoples. Some southeastern indigenous (native) groups played a game in the village square in which players competed to hit a wooden pole with a ball. Many groups drank tea brewed from the leaves of the cassina plant, also called the yaupon holly. During ceremonies, people drank cassina tea from cups made from the shells of large sea snails called whelks. They sometimes placed these cups in burial mounds. The Timucua decorated their bodies with paint and tattoos.
Timucua groups settled in a variety of natural environments, leading to many cultural differences among groups. Village organization, diet, pottery, and tool-making styles varied from settlement to settlement. The Timucua language had at least 10 dialects. Scholars often distinguish between the eastern and western Timucua groups. Eastern Timucua villages were built along the shores of the St. Johns River and its tributaries. Eastern Timucua also lived along the coastal lagoons and marshes near the Atlantic coast of Florida and southeastern Georgia. Western Timucua villages stood inland, around lakes, rivers, and creeks within northern Florida’s oak and pine forests.
Fish and shellfish were important to the Timucua diet, which also included meat from land animals as well as a variety of plant foods. Timucua groups migrated with the seasons to follow their food sources. After corn was introduced to northern Florida peoples, the Timucua became farmers. They also grew beans and squash. However, they maintained their seasonal migrations and continued to rely heavily on fish and other foods gathered from the water.
Early historical texts describe some Timucua villages as being surrounded by walls made of stakes. Such villages featured public places for grain storage. Thatched, circular huts surrounded an open plaza and a council house.
History
In the mid-1500’s, Spanish expeditions into what is now the southern United States crossed through western Timucua territory. In 1539, the Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto led an army of over 500 men through a number of Timucua villages on its way to northern Florida. The army took stored food from the villages and kidnapped villagers. They forced Timucua men to serve as guides and to carry their loads, and they took Timucua women as mates. Many Timucua died fighting Spanish invaders.
In 1565, the Spanish naval captain Pedro Menéndez de Avilés established the settlement of St. Augustine at the village of the Timucua chief Seloy. Menéndez arranged for Jesuit and then Franciscan missionaries to convert the Timucua to Roman Catholicism. Around the year 1600, chiefs of the various eastern and western Timucua tribes traveled to St. Augustine to pledge allegiance to the Spanish crown. Their acceptance of Spanish authority led to the expansion of Spanish missions from the western Timucua settlements in northern Florida to the Apalachee villages of the Florida Panhandle.
The Franciscan missionary Francisco Pareja produced a grammar of the Timucua language in the early 1600’s. Pareja lived among the Timucua from 1595 to 1626, mainly at the mission of San Juan del Puerto. The text of the grammar survives to the present day, as do several religious documents that Pareja wrote in both Timucua and Spanish. Two Timucua-language catechisms written by Friar Gregorio de Movilla have also survived. Other surviving works in the Timucua language include two letters from Timucua chiefs to the Spanish crown, one written in 1651 and one in 1688.
The Franciscan mission system, which lasted from about 1590 to 1705, exposed Timucua peoples to foreigners who carried diseases previously unknown among them, killing much of their population. Violent conflicts and an increasing demand for indigenous labor and food to support Spanish settlements also resulted in the deaths of many Timucua and disrupted their traditional ways of life. By the early 1700’s, the population of Timucua-speaking people was reduced to around 1,000 individuals. Enslavement and conflicts with incoming British colonists forced the remaining western Timucua and other groups allied with the Spanish to seek refuge at St. Augustine. As a result, the Spanish mission system in northern Florida collapsed. By 1763, when Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain, only a few Timucua remained there. They and other indigenous Floridian refugees eventually relocated to Cuba.
