In an article for the Annual Review of Anthropology (“Mission Archaeology,” 1998), Elizabeth Graham assessed the state of knowledge in North American archaeology by summarizing archaeological finds in California, the US Southwest, Texas, and the US Southeast (La Florida). Although California was clearly minimized in Graham's review—with an assessment based in part on art history as opposed to archaeology—archaeology in Florida, and in La Florida more generally, was for the most part given high marks. Characterizing California mission studies at the time, Graham argued that mission archaeology had been focused on recovering “information for the reconstruction of mission buildings for tourists” (p. 27). By contrast, Graham acknowledged that “the cohesiveness with which research on the Spanish mission enterprise has proceeded in La Florida is, in my view, unmatched elsewhere” (p. 31).

As a field archaeologist who has devoted the past 28 years to studying Spanish missions in California and the Southwest, particularly those dimensions devoted to ethnogenesis, missionization, settlement, architectural history, and syncretic accommodation, I have developed an intimate understanding of the challenges inherent in the conduct of historical (read: urban) archaeology and the interdisciplinary orientation of lab and field research in California. Whereas the majority of the 21 California missions constitute active parish communities under the jurisdiction of their respective Roman Catholic diocese or the state of California, the Spanish missions of La Florida are largely devoid of standing architecture and are therefore subject to the whims of private property owners, university research interventions, or the purview of the state of Florida and its cultural resources teams.

Interestingly, although Florida boasts some 100 Spanish Catholic mission sites, both Jesuit and Franciscan, virtually all were constituted from perishable materials in the period from 1565 through 1704. As such, the Florida sites were soon relegated to the realm of archaeology and its corollary natural and cultural formation processes. By contrast, the 21 California missions and a handful of sub-missions, or asistencias, erected between 1769 and 1824 largely survived the urban onslaught of the 1800s and early 1900s because of their durable adobe and masonry architectural constructs. Though the Mexican secularization of the 1830s resulted in the abandonment of most California missions, the advent of the American period brought with it a renewed interest in the late nineteenth-century restoration, excavation, and corollary transformation of these ruinous monumental shrines into parish churches.

The foregoing facts led to the contrasting theoretical orientations and field methodologies that predominate in California and Florida. Unearthing the Missions of Spanish Florida represents an unparalleled contribution to the literature on the Spanish missions of North America. The 10 chapters and 15 scholars included in this extraordinary resource advance unique and thematically cogent theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary concerns and perspectives. At the same time, the editors and authors speak to the vagaries of the archaeological record and the variable quality of data available for analysis, particularly in orphaned collections. Each chapter provides thoroughgoing assessments of the archaeological, historical, and ethnohistorical research that has shaped the elucidation of each region's cultural, social, ideological, economic, and paleodemographic profiles.

The Florida missions featured most prominently include those of San Juan del Puerto, Nombre de Dios, San Lorenzo de Ivitachuco (8JE106, also known as the Anderson Mission site), San Damian de Escambe, San Joseph de Escambe, San Pedro y San Pablo de Patale, San Luis de Talimali, and the missions of the Apalachee province. Each author brings to the table exciting new insights ranging from discussions centered on the archaeological correlates of mission life; temporal and archaeological chronologies; mission demise and destruction; settlement models; Indigenous ceramic typologies; a Florida mission model replete with detailed criteria, including the discernment of cultural affiliation and contact; military assemblages; funerary traditions; and Hispanic lifestyles as evident from ceramics, foodways, and religious doctrines. Notable contributions include those chapters devoted to food production economies, the lives of the friars, the archaeology of site 8JE106, the collapse of the Apalachee province, and a reconstruction of the history of sound and acoustics at Mission San Luis de Talimali in modern Tallahassee.

This forward-looking contribution chronicles sustained long-term research and those interrogations of the evidence that have resulted in significant advances and changing perspectives on relations among Indigenous Apalachee and Timucuan peoples, Jesuit and Franciscan friars, and Spanish soldiers and settlers. Although the editors trace the advent of Apalachee-Spanish mission archaeology to Professor Hale G. Smith and the archaeologists of the Department of Anthropology at Florida State University in 1950, the past 30 years since Bonnie G. McEwan's edited volume, The Spanish Missions of La Florida (1993), have proven a watershed moment for scholarly understandings of the missionary enterprise in La Florida—particularly as it pertains to questions of ethnogenesis, both Hispanic and Indigenous foodways, syncretism, conflict, and warfare. In rendering their individual and collective contributions to contemporary understandings of the Florida missions, this work serves to humanize both the archaeological experience and the lives of the very peoples subject to the fractious frontiers of the Spanish borderlands experience.