Timucua
The Timucua were a Native American people who lived in Northeast and North Central Florida and southeast Georgia. They were the largest indigenous group in that area and consisted of about 35 chiefdoms, many leading thousands of people. The various groups of Timucua spoke several dialects of the Timucua language. At the time of European contact, Timucuan speakers occupied about in the present-day states of Florida and Georgia, with an estimated population of 200,000. Milanich notes that the population density calculated from those figures, is close to the population densities calculated by other authors for the Bahamas and for Hispaniola at the time of first European contact. The territory occupied by Timucua speakers stretched from the Altamaha River and Cumberland Island in present-day Georgia as far south as Lake George in central Florida, and from the Atlantic Ocean west to the Aucilla River in the Florida Panhandle, though it reached the Gulf of Mexico at no more than a couple of points.
The name "Timucua" came from the exonym used by the Saturiwa to refer to the Utina, another group to the west of the St. Johns River. The Spanish came to use the term more broadly for other peoples in the area. Eventually it became the common term for all peoples who spoke what is known as Timucuan.
While alliances and confederacies arose between the chiefdoms from time to time, the Timucua were never organized into a single political unit. The various groups of Timucua speakers practiced several different cultural traditions. The people suffered severely from the introduction of Eurasian infectious diseases. By 1595, their population was estimated to have been reduced from 200,000 to 50,000, and thirteen chiefdoms remained. By 1700, the population of the tribe had been reduced to an estimated 1,000 due to slave raids from Carolinian settlers and their Indian allies. The local slave trade completed their extinction as a tribe soon after the turn of the 18th century.
Meaning
The word "Timucuan" may derive from "Thimogona" or "Tymangoua", an exonym used by the Saturiwa chiefdom of present-day Jacksonville for their enemies, the Utina, who lived inland along the St. Johns River. Both groups spoke dialects of the Timucua language. The French followed the Saturiwa in this usage, but the Spanish applied the term "Timucua" much more widely to groups within a wide section of interior North Florida. In the 16th century, they designated the area north of the Santa Fe River between the St. Johns and Suwannee Rivers as the Timucua Province, which they incorporated into the mission system. The dialect spoken in that province became known as "Timucua". During the 17th century, the Province of Timucua was extended to include the area between the Suwannee River and the Aucilla River, thus extending its scope. Eventually, "Timucua" was applied to all speakers of the various dialects of the Timucua language.History
The Timucua were organized into as many as 35 chiefdoms, each of which had hundreds of people in assorted villages within its purview. They sometimes formed loose political alliances, but did not operate as a single political unit.Timucua tribes, in common with other peoples in Florida, engaged in limited warfare with each other. The standard pattern was to raid a town by surprise, kill and scalp as many men of the town as possible during the battle, and carry away any women and children that could be captured. The victors in such battles did not try to pursue their defeated enemies, and there were no prolonged campaigns. Laudonnière reported that after a successful raid a tribe would celebrate its victory for three days and nights.
The Timucua may have been the first American natives to see the landing of Juan Ponce de León, if that landing was near St. Augustine in 1513. However, claims have also been made for Ponce de Leon Inlet, the portion of an unnamed barrier island in Melbourne Beach, and Jupiter Inlet as the site of the landing.
Later, in 1528, Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition passed along the western fringes of the Timucua territory.
In 1539, Hernando de Soto led an army of more than 500 men through the western parts of Timucua territory, stopping in a series of villages of the Ocale, Potano, Northern Utina, and Yustaga branches of the Timucua on his way to the Apalachee domain. His army seized the food stored in the villages, forced women into concubinage, and forced men and boys to serve as guides and bearers. The army fought two battles with Timucua groups, resulting in heavy Timucua casualties. After defeating the resisting Timucuan warriors, Hernando de Soto had 200 executed, in what was to be called the Napituca Massacre, the first large-scale massacre by Europeans on what later became U.S. soil. De Soto was in a hurry to reach the Apalachee domain, where he expected to find gold and sufficient food to support his army through the winter, so he did not linger in Timucua territory. The Acuera resisted the Spaniards de Soto's forces when de Soto's forces tried to seize stored food from Acuera towns, killing several of the Spaniards.
In 1564, French Huguenots led by René Goulaine de Laudonnière founded Fort Caroline in present-day Jacksonville and attempted to establish further settlements along the St. Johns River. After initial conflict, the Huguenots established friendly relations with the local natives in the area, primarily the Timucua under the cacique Saturiwa. Sketches of the Timucua drawn by Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, one of the French settlers, have proven valuable resources for modern ethnographers in understanding the people. The next year the Spanish under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés surprised the Huguenots and ransacked Fort Caroline, killing everyone but 50 women and children and 26 escapees. The rest of the French had been shipwrecked off the coast and picked up by the Spanish, who executed all but 20 of them; this brought French settlement in Florida to an end. These events caused a rift between the natives and Spanish, though Spanish missionaries were soon out in force.
The Timucua history changed after the Spanish established St. Augustine in 1565 as the capital of their province of Florida. From here, Spanish missionaries established missions in each main town of the Timucuan chiefdoms, including the Santa Isabel de Utinahica mission in what is now southern Georgia, for the Utinahica. By 1595, the Timucuan population had shrunk by 75%, primarily from epidemics of new infectious diseases introduced by contact with Europeans, and war.
By 1700, the Timucuan population had been reduced to just 1,000. In 1703, Governor James Moore led a force of colonists from Carolina with allied Creek, Catawba, and Yuchi and launched slave raids against the Timucua, killing and enslaving hundreds of them.
A census in 1711 found 142 Timucua-speakers living in four villages under Spanish protection. Another census in 1717 found 256 people in three villages where Timucua was the language of the majority, although there were a few inhabitants with a different native language. The population of the Timucua villages was 167 in 1726. By 1759 the Timucua under Spanish protection and control numbered just six adults and five half-Timucua children.
In 1763, when Spain ceded Florida to Great Britain, the Spanish took the less than 100 Timucua and other natives to Cuba. Research is underway in Cuba to discover if any Timucua descendants exist there. Some historians believe a small group of Timucua may have stayed behind in Florida or Georgia and possibly assimilated into other groups such as the Seminoles. Many Timucua artifacts are stored at the Florida Museum of Natural History, the University of Florida and in other museums.
Tribes
The Timucua were divided into a number of different tribes or chiefdoms, each of which spoke one of the nine or ten dialects of the Timucua language. The tribes can be placed into eastern and western groups. The Eastern Timucua were located along the Atlantic coast and on the Sea Islands of northern Florida and southeastern Georgia; along the St. Johns River and its tributaries; and among the rivers, swamps and associated inland forests in southeastern Georgia, possibly including the Okefenokee Swamp. They usually lived in villages close to waterways, participated in the St. Johns culture or in unnamed cultures related to the Wilmington-Savannah culture, and were more focused on exploiting the resources of marine and wetland environments. All of the known Eastern Timucua tribes were incorporated into the Spanish mission system starting in the late 16th century.The Western Timucua lived in the interior of the upper Florida peninsula, extending to the Aucilla River on the west and into Georgia to the north. They usually lived in villages in hammocks, and participated in the Alachua, Suwannee Valley or other unknown cultures. Because of their environment, they were more oriented to exploiting the resources of the hammocks.
Early 20th-century scholars such as John Swanton and John Goggin identified tribes and chiefdoms around Tampa Bay – including Tocobaga, Uzita, Pohoy, and Mocoso – as Timucua speakers, classified by Goggin as Southern Timucua. Hann has argued that there is evidence that the Mocoso spoke a dialect of Timucua, while the other chiefdoms of the Tampa Bay area spoke a different, unknown language.
A chiefdom in central Florida led by Urriparacoxi may have spoken Timucua. "Urriparacoxi" was a Timucuan term for "war-prince". While leadership titles were borrowed between different languages in what is now the southeastern United States, "Urriparacoxi" is not known to have been used by any group that did not speak Timucuan.
Based on a vocabulary list collected from a man named Lamhatty in 1708, Swanton classified the Tawasa language as a dialect of Timucuan. Later scholars have noted that while the vocabulary items appear to be mostly related to Timucuan, Lamhatty's tribal identity remains uncertain.