Archeology Series Presentation: Rachel Briggs, “Scorched: Native Women and Spanish Men in Sixteenth Century La Florida”

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. 

About the speaker: Rachel Virginia Briggs will join us from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology and the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Curriculum in Archaeology. Briggs earned her MA and PhD at the University of Alabama and her BA from Warren Wilson College. She is a specialist on foodways archaeology, ceramic analysis, experimental archaeology, and gender in archaeology, particularly in the Mississippian, post-European contact, and colonial periods in the American Indian Southeastern United States. Briggs is the author of several important pieces of scholarship, including a 2015 article in the journal Native South on “The Hominy Foodway of the Historic Native Eastern Woodlands.” She’s the co-editor of the anthology Mississippian Women, published by the University of Florida Press in 2024 and recently released in paper. Most recently, she is the author and editor of a forum in the journal Native South on Catawba women and gender at the Joara site in Morganton, NC, where is the co-director of the Exploring Joara Research Project.