World of the Timucua 

2 years, 4 months, 1 day to St. Augustine's 450th anniversary

  In actuality there never were any Indians who called themselves Timucua. A French military officer stationed in 1564 at Fort Caroline in northeast Florida in wrote that "Thimogona" was a term the local Indians used to refer to an enemy tribe.

   The Spaniards adopted the word ("Timuquana") and used it to refer to the mission province that encompassed many of the Timucua groups. Modern researchers, following the Spaniards, have adopted it as the name of the language and the Indians who spoke that language.

   Some 200,000 Timucua lived in north Florida and south Georgia when the Europeans arrived. Their villages were organized into about 35 distinct groups, each with its own territory and chief. They grew corn, squashes, and other plants, though the majority of their foods probably came from hunting animals and gathering plants.

   They also speared fish from canoes and caught them in nets and weirs
 (small dams). Hunters, sometimes disguised in deer costumes to get near their prey, used bows and arrows, snares, and other techniques. Sometimes fires were lit to drive game toward waiting hunters or into nets.

   Like other Florida Indians, the Timucua decorated themselves with paint and tattoos and wore bone hairpins and shell and bone ornaments. They made clothing from animal hides and plant fibers, including Spanish moss. Men wore ear ornaments, including some fashioned from fish bladders.

   Families lived in small, circular, palm-thatched houses shaped like round pyramids. Low benches for sitting and sleeping lined the walls. Small smudge fires under the benches helped ward off insects.

   The villages also had granaries and round council houses, some large enough to hold hundreds of people. In these, villagers met to take care of community business and to dance and hold ceremonies, which at times included taking Black Drink, traditionally drunk from a whelk shell cup.

   Image: Theodore Morris, floridalosttribes.com, who writes: The Eastern Freshwater Timucua lived inland from northeast coastal Florida. In the 1560s a chief was described as using red face paint. The tattoos are based on designs used on Timucua pottery.

   St. Augustine Bedtime Stories - Dramatic accounts of famous people and events in St. Augustine's history - in booklets designed for quick reads before bed. Information here.