22 Facts About Timucua

Timucua were a Native American people who lived in Northeast and North Central Florida and southeast Georgia.

The territory occupied by Timucua speakers stretched from the Altamaha River and Cumberland Island in present-day Georgia as far south as Lake George in central Florida, and from the Atlantic Ocean west to the Aucilla River in the Florida Panhandle, though it reached the Gulf of Mexico at no more than a couple of points.

Name "Timucua" came from the exonym used by the Saturiwa to refer to the Utina, another group to the west of the St Johns River.

The various groups of Timucua speakers practiced several different cultural traditions.

The Timucua were organized into as many as 35 chiefdoms, each of which had hundreds of people in assorted villages within its purview.

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In 1539, Hernando de Soto led an army of more than 500 men through the western parts of Timucua territory, stopping in a series of villages of the Ocale, Potano, Northern Utina, and Yustaga branches of the Timucua on his way to the Apalachee domain .

Timucua's army seized the food stored in the villages, forced women into concubinage, and forced men and boys to serve as guides and bearers.

Sketches of the Timucua drawn by Jacques le Moyne de Morgues, one of the French settlers, have proven valuable resources for modern ethnographers in understanding the people.

Census in 1711 found 142 Timucua-speakers living in four villages under Spanish protection.

Many Timucua artifacts are stored at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida and other museums.

Timucua were divided into a number of different tribes or chiefdoms, each of which spoke one of the nine or ten dialects of the Timucua language.

The Eastern Timucua were located along the Atlantic coast and on the Sea Islands of northern Florida and southeastern Georgia; along the St Johns River and its tributaries; and among the rivers, swamps and associated inland forests in southeastern Georgia, possibly including the Okefenokee Swamp.

All of the known Eastern Timucua tribes were incorporated into the Spanish mission system starting in the late 16th century.

Western Timucua lived in the interior of the upper Florida peninsula, extending to the Aucilla River on the west and into Georgia to the north.

Largest and best known of the eastern Timucua groups were the Mocama, who lived in the coastal areas of what are now Florida and southeastern Georgia, from St Simons Island to south of the mouth of the St Johns River.

European contact with the Eastern Timucua began in 1564 when the French Huguenots under Rene Goulaine de Laudonniere established Fort Caroline in Saturiwa territory.

The western Timucua game was evidently less associated with religious significance, violence, and fraud than the Apalachee version, and as such missionaries had a much more difficult time convincing them to give it up.

Eastern Timucua played a similar game in which balls were thrown, rather than kicked, at a goal post.

The Timucua probably played chunkey, as did the neighboring Apalachee and Guale peoples, but there is no firm evidence of this.

Timucua were a semi-agricultural people and ate foods native to North Central Florida.

The doctrina, a guide for Catholics attending Mass, written in Latin with Spanish and Timucua commentary, was discovered at All Souls College Library in Oxford in 2019 by Dr Timothy Johnson of Flagler College in St Augustine, Florida.

An ongoing project to document and recover the lexicon of Timucua is being led by George Aaron Broadwell, Elling Eide Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida.