Skip to main content
Lecture/Presentation/Talk

Lunch Club Series | Scorched: Native Women and Spanish Men at Joara and Fort San Juan, 1566-1568

Sponsored by

This event is over.

Event Details:

Lunch Club provides affiliates of the Stanford Archaeology Center with a community-oriented forum for engagement with current issues in archaeology. On November 6, 2024 we will host Dr. Rachel Briggs from University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

Abstract:

In the summer of 1567 in the mountains of what would become western North Carolina and Virginia, eight Native women were enslaved by a group of Spanish soldiers and Native warriors, forcing them into the brutal world of La Florida. This group of Native women become unlikely observers to one of history’s lost chapters, bearing witness to Spain’s repeated failed attempts at colonization of the Southeastern United States in the sixteenth century. In this presentation, I focus on a small portion of their journey that took them to the Native town of Joara and the Spanish colonial site of Fort San Juan where they were expected to cook and care for at least thirty Spanish soldiers, before they were relocated to the Spanish colony of Santa Elena in early 1568. 

Bio:

Rachel V. Briggs, Ph.D., is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. She specializes in gender, foodways, and identity within Indigenous communities of the Southeastern United States, with a focus on multisensory studies and Indigenous feminist perspectives. Dr. Briggs is the principal investigator of the Exploring Joara Research Project, which examines the ways Native people navigated Spanish colonial entanglements in the upper Catawba River Valley. Her research on Indigenous foodways, including her work on hominy and nixtamalization, has been widely published, and she is the lead editor of the 2024 volume Mississippian Women. Her ongoing projects include two book manuscripts, one focused on Southeastern Native American culinary traditions, and the second on Native American women in sixteenth-century La Florida.

 

Location:

Stream Information: