Environment and Agriculture
Unlike most barrier islands, which are essentially beach ridges built by waves, the barrier islands of Georgia were formed five thousand years ago when sea levels rose enough to isolate the Ice Age island core from the mainland, creating the richest barrier islands in the world. The one hundred miles of Georgia coastline protects one-third of all salt marshes in eastern North America — several times more productive than America’s most fertile farmland.
Food bones recovered from excavations at Mission Santa Catalina de Guale (St. Catherines) highlight the dynamic interchange between the Natives and the colonists that resulted in new, hybrid subsistence patterns. The mission Guale supplied foods (especially maize) to Spaniards in great quantities, expanding the European menu to look more like traditional, precontact Guale fare.
Maize, beans, and varieties of squash were grown on the Guale coast. Acorns were ground into flour, and blackberries were dried to eat during the winter. Oysters were a staple in their diet, and the location of Guale settlements along rivers and tidal creeks seems to have actually been a strategic measure to be near shellfish, hunting grounds, and horticultural lands without having to change residence seasonally.
Europeans introduced domesticated fowl to the Guale coast, and these were apparently widely adopted. The same may have been true of pigs – wild pigs were found on deserted Sapelo Island in 1595.
Trade
External supply was difficult during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, leaving the citizenry of St. Augustine with many impoverished military families and not enough farmers to work the land. To ameliorate this, St. Augustine relied heavily upon an elaborate exchange network through which Native populations channel their surplus food and labor into the colonial capital.
Indigenous Timucua, Mocama, and Guale chiefs annexed a powerful military ally in the Spanish garrison at St. Augustine by pledging alliance and obedience to Spanish officials. In the process, the chiefs not only created a new market for their agricultural surplus, but they also gained access to new tools and technologies to improve their yield. The caciques also readily converted their surpluses into Spanish goods (such as cloth, tools, and beads) and they received tribute from both the Spanish and their own people. The micos thus continued to employ lavish displays of wealth as a way to reinforce their hereditary status. “It seems no surprise that most aboriginal chiefs struggled to gain entry into the mission system, and remained there for so long” (Worth).
