President’s Message for September 2021
August General Meeting Highlights I want to personally thank Prof. Keith Ashley for an outstanding presentation about the ongoing archaeological excavations on Big Talbot Island. If you were unable to attend our first in-person meeting since Covid_19, then you also missed one of the best speakers we’ve been able to schedule! If your perception of what a Timucuan village looked like back in the 16th Century is tied to Theodore de Bry’s engraving, pictured here, then you have been deceived. The excavation is showing that the depiction is largely the fanciful artistry of de Bry, where he reused features found in other tribal villages and applied it to whatever tribe he was engraving at the time. History shows us that tribes were distinct and reliant on the resources around them. Their utensils, tools, food, and homes were all dependent on the resources available. The findings at Mocama are based on three themes described by Prof. Ashley: Hereditary Leaders Ranked Clans Social Inequality Mocama is not the only dig Prof. Ashley is leading, we hope to have him back in 2022 to discuss the findings from the other excavation! July General Meeting Highlights I missed commenting about our virtual meeting held in July as I was still working on a personal family writeup, the fruition of that presentation. As we did in June, we featured a video lecture from Prof. John Philip Colletta, part of the genealogy DVD series by The Great Courses called Discovering your roots : an introduction to …