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Guale and Mocama shifting and shrinking
Source: The Struggle for the Georgia Coast #129
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"A simple glance at the late 17th-century mission lists (see Appendix B) for Guale and Mocama reveals a striking contrast with the long lists of subject towns and villages comprising the early 17th-century chiefdoms in the same region (see, for example, Jones, 1978: 205-209). There is good evidence that during the first half of the 17th century the provinces of Guale and Mocama underwent a remarkable shift in settlement systems, inasmuch as chiefdoms composed of a multiplicity of apparently separate settlements had by the last half of the century been reduced to only a handful of distinct towns. The few towns comprising Guale and Mocama during the late 17th century seem to have been more or less spatially discrete populations living together as a community. Nevertheless, as is clear in many of the documents in this volume, many of the names of the villages that once made up the early 17th-century chiefdoms in this region seem to have persisted throughout the late 17th century, generally as hereditary titles possessed by individuals living together in these core towns. Furthermore, these titular leaders seem also to have had "vassals" of their own, although presumably mixed within the general population of the town. How can this phenomenon be explained? The difference appears to lie more in the physical location of each former satellite village, and not necessarily in its human composition or leadership. What changed during the early 17th century was not so much the overall sociopolitical organization of Guale and Mocama, but the distribution of population across the landscape. Specifically, while outlying satellite villages did not completely disappear, they seem to have physically relocated to central towns, where they apparently maintained a distinct identity within the general population of each town. As a result, each of the core towns traced in the discussion below seems to have been composed of the remnants of chiefly lineages from many or all of the numerous early 17th-century satellite villages that formed the five chiefdoms noted above. What were the processes leading to the reduction and aggregation of the population of the Guale and Mocama areas during the first half of the 17th century? In all likelihood, the transformation along this coastal region north of St. Augustine was not unlike that experienced by the Timucua mission province of interior northern Florida at about the same time (Worth, 1992). Population loss within the context of massive epidemics and the stresses of the draft labor system resulted in increasingly dysfunctional aboriginal societies, and whether by Spanish or Indian intent (and probably by a combination ofboth), settlement systems became increasingly centralized within the context of the colonial system of Spanish Florida. The interior Timucua province of the late 17th century bore a remarkable resemblance to Guale and Mocama at the same time, inasmuch as each society had been reduced to just a few central towns along the primary transportation corridors west and north of St. Augustine." (Worth SGC)
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