Mission Cemeteries, Mission Peoples: Historical and Evolutionary Dimensions of Intracemetary Bioarchaeology in Spanish Florida

“Stojanowski takes you on an amazing trip to different historic Spanish missions in the southeastern United States. These missions are filled with skeletons that are a chorus of Native American voices speaking of church services they attended both in life and in death.”—Keith P. Jacobi, author of Last Rites for the Tipu Maya: Genetic Structuring in a Colonial Cemetery
“Mission Cemeteries, Mission Peoples is a must-have for any student or scholar of bioarchaeology. . . . An instant anthropological classic.”—Richard C. Sutter, Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne

Mission Cemeteries, Mission Peoples offers clear, accessible explanations of complex methods for observing evolutionary effects in populations. Christopher Stojanowski’s intimate knowledge of the historical, archaeological, and skeletal data illuminates the existing narrative of diet, disease, and demography in Spanish Florida. Employing intracemetery analyses, he demonstrates how such an approach can provide likely explanations for variability in lived experiences as observed in the bioarchaeological record in instances where historical information is either silent or ambiguous.

Stojanowski forgoes the traditional broadly comparative analysis of Native American populations and instead looks at the physical person who lived in the historic Southeast. What did they eat? Did they die from chronic or acute diseases? With whom did they attend a Spanish church? Where were they buried in death within the church and why? The answers to these questions allow us to infer much about the lives of mission peoples.