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Book Review
| The Calusa and Their Legacy: South Florida People and Their Environments. By Darcie A. MacMahon and William H. Marquardt. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. xiv + 183 pp. Illustrations, notes, suggested readings, bibliography, index. $39.95.
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| Anyone interested in South Florida—its landscape, wildlife, native peoples, and their history—will be drawn to this attractive and engaging volume. In The Calusa and Their Legacy, MacMahon and Marquardt, two archaeologists and museum specialists from the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, provide a vivid picture of the Calusa Indians and their natural world. The last of Florida's native peoples to succumb to the Columbian invasion, the Calusa once dominated the region from Charlotte Harbor to the southern tip of this important Spanish colony. Their complex, hierarchical society on the model of Mississippian culture was dispersed in as many as sixty mounded villages and was ruled by a cacique whose influence spread throughout the lower half of the Florida peninsula. By the second decade of the eighteenth century, however, disease, enslavement, and the displacement of Spanish colonization had taken their toll. Too few Calusa survived to be any longer recognized as a discrete people. By the nineteenth century and the transfer of Florida to the United States, their culture had given way to fusion groups such as the Seminole and Miccosukee that were so common on the peripheries of American society. A final chapter of this volume covers their world. |
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MacMahon and Marquardt's account of the Calusa is as much a natural history as it is an ethnohistorical or archaeological study. Chapters on ecoenvironments such as mud flats, sea grass beds, and mangrove forests read like a field guide to the natural world of South Florida. Each of these chapters, however, explains the Calusa's role in the food chain and describes the varied resources they derived from it. So abundant was their maritime world and so adept were they at exploiting it that intensive agriculture never became part of their subsistence system despite a rigid class structure of nobles and commoners otherwise so closely associated with staple economies. |
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This book is not the first of MacMahon and Marquardt's collaborations. In October 2002, the Florida Museum of Natural History opened the Hall of South Florida People and Environments. The book, they claim, was inspired by the exhibit they helped curate. More companion volume than scholarly monograph, it is not intended solely for academic audiences. What may be a shortcoming among specialists, however, is at the same time a strength among the very readers scholars so often claim as their larger public. Thus the book has many features often missing from learned publications, and the University Press of Florida is to be commended for including them. First, the book is highly visual. Several hundred photographs, including fifty-six color plates, amplify the text. So good are the two dozen or so pen-and-ink drawings by Merald Clark that this talented artist should, perhaps, have been recognized as illustrator on the title page. Second, the book is useful. In addition to the accustomed apparatus of academic publishing, it contains sections on resources for teachers and places to visit for tourists. And finally, it is prescriptive. Throughout the text the authors build a strong case for the preservation of cultural and natural resources. Although lacking in culture theory, quantified archaeological data, or extensively documented footnotes, this volume should attract considerable attention for the accessibility it provides to a subject vividly portrayed. |
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Warren R. Hofstra is professor of history at Shenandoah University in Winchester, Virginia. He is the author of The Planting of New Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the Shenandoah Valley (Johns Hopkins, 2004). In addition to a global commodity study of grain and flour production in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his current work includes an interpretative volume on landscape studies for historians. |
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