Tatham Mound and the Bioarchaeology of European Contact: Disease and Depopulation in Central Gulf Coast Florida (Ripley P. Bullen Series) - Tapa dura

"A landmark that will easily become a classic reference in the field ... An accessible and detailed treatment of some of the best modern scholarship regarding the archaeology of a late prehistoric-early historic era burial mound in the Southeastern United States ... provides specialists and non-specialists alike with an engaging account of Tatham Mound and what it reveals regarding the lives and deaths of Native Americans at the cusp of the European colonial era." -- John E. Worth

This is the first systematic analysis of Tatham Mound, one of the most important archaeological sites in Central Gulf Coast Florida. Because it documents the earliest years of contact between the resident Native Americans of the area and European colonists, Tatham Mound has provided archaeologists and bioarchaeologists with a wealth of direct and indirect evidence from the early contact period - a rare occurrence in American archaeology. Hutchinson examines the skeletal remains of more than 350 burials as well as the European artifacts found within those burials. Comparing the bioarchaeological evidence and scientific data with the historic accounts of the early Spanish explorers, Hutchinson challenges the long-held theory that novel pathogens caused the immediate demographic collapse of native societies at the inception of the European colonial era. He argues that long-term political, social, economic, and biological changes - in addition to introduced epidemic disease - all contributed to the decline of Florida's native populations.