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Florida coin beads and metal ceremonial tablets: how Spanish silver reached the Highlands County interior

Two published studies explain how European silver came to be buried, in Indigenous form, in a mound on Lake Josephine. Charles H. Fairbanks defined the artifact class in 1968, and George M. Luer mapped the wider distribution of metal ceremonial tablets in 1994. Together they show that the Goodnow Mound belongs to a religious and political network centered on the Okeechobee and Kissimmee interior, and that the silver in it came from wrecked Spanish ships on the Atlantic coast rather than from any local source.[fairbanks-1968][luer-1994]

What a Florida coin bead is

Fairbanks named the type after examining silver beads that turn up in Florida Indian sites but never in purely Spanish sites in Florida or the Caribbean.[fairbanks-1968] He listed Goodnow Mound first among the sites producing them, alongside Fort Center west of Lake Okeechobee, Punta Rassa on the west coast, and scattered finds around Vero Beach.[fairbanks-1968]

The beads are usually spherical with flattened ends, sometimes cylindrical, most often barrel-shaped, and smooth enough to show few tool marks.[fairbanks-1968] Every one shares a distinctive profile: cut lengthwise, the bead resembles a capital letter H, with a large hole pierced through the crossbar.[fairbanks-1968] About half the perforations are square and show small extrusions of metal at the lip, the mark of a punched rather than a drilled hole.[fairbanks-1968]

Fairbanks measured seventeen beads from Punta Rassa, ranging from 6.5 to 17 millimeters in diameter and from 0.65 to 25.6 grams in weight.[fairbanks-1968] Matching each against the legal weight of Spanish coin denominations from a quarter real to eight reales, he found the finished beads averaged about 86 percent of the coin’s nominal weight, a loss he attributed to hammering and finishing rather than to any deliberate standard.[fairbanks-1968]

How they were made

Fairbanks reconstructed the technique from the beads themselves and tested it experimentally.[fairbanks-1968] The maker took a Spanish cut coin and punched a hole through the center with a wrought iron nail, which had a square cross-section and was considerably harder than the silver or billon coin. Fairbanks’s experiments with silver discs of coin thickness on a hardwood anvil showed the coin need not be heated first.[fairbanks-1968]

The nail then stayed in the hole and served as a handle. Holding the pierced coin upright, the maker hammered its edge repeatedly while rotating it around the punch, thickening the rim into a double-mushroom shape that gradually approached the finished H profile.[fairbanks-1968] Leaving the punch in place kept the hole from collapsing.[fairbanks-1968] A final polish completed the bead, though Fairbanks judged that skilled hammering left little polishing to do.[fairbanks-1968]

The work required no silversmith. Fairbanks concluded the process lay within the capability of either Florida Indians or Spanish sailors untrained in metalworking, and that the beads were “clearly not made by skilled silversmiths.”[fairbanks-1968]

Where the silver came from, and where it went

Fairbanks dated the beads to roughly 1650 to 1720 from the glass beads found with them, noting that types such as the Florida Cut Crystal and Amber beads belong to the seventeenth century and are rarely found as late as the 1715 wreck of the Spanish treasure fleet off the Sebastian Inlet coast.[fairbanks-1968] At Goodnow the coin beads were associated with Florida Cut Crystal, Amber Chevron, Ichetucknee Plain Blue, and Florida Spheroidal beads together with white, light blue and dark blue seed beads.[fairbanks-1968]

Most Spanish wrecks occurred on the Atlantic coast, especially near Cape Canaveral, yet Fairbanks found few coin beads there: two or three from Goodnow Mound and a handful of Vero Beach sites, against a majority from central and west coast sites.[fairbanks-1968] He proposed that the beads were made on the east coast, by Spaniards or Indians, and then carried into Calusa country as tribute within the redistributive system that John Goggin and William Sturtevant had described for the Calusa.[fairbanks-1968] Wrecked crews were a plausible link either way: Fairbanks cited Jonathan Dickinson’s account of coastal salvage and Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda’s captivity to show that shipwrecked mariners often lived among Florida Indians for years, and noted that Spanish salvage crews recruited Indian labor locally.[fairbanks-1968]

The third Goodnow tablet

Griffin and Smith recovered one small silver ceremonial tablet at Goodnow in 1947, lying on a mass of more than 1,500 white seed beads with one large blue bead, associated with two individuals recorded as Burial No. 21.[griffin-smith-1948][luer-1994] Luer records that it remains the only Florida metal tablet ever excavated under controlled archaeological conditions, despite the many since found.[luer-1994] A 1984 catalogue of fifty metal tablets listed it as MT#20 and attributed a second, larger silver tablet to the same mound, found by diggers around 1954.[luer-1994]

The same diggers claimed a third tablet but produced neither the object nor a photograph, so the catalogue omitted it.[luer-1994] Afterwards its custodians retrieved it from safekeeping and showed it to Luer, who published it as MT#51.[luer-1994] It measures 3.75 centimeters long by 2.50 wide, is about a millimeter thick at most and tapers to a very thin edge at both ends, and carries no incised design.[luer-1994] Its outline belongs to a regional style Luer assigns to his Zone 3, previously known from only seven other tablets in east-central and south-central Florida, and its round edge perforation alongside two square central holes suggests it hung sideways rather than vertically.[luer-1994]

Luer reports that the tablet may itself have been cut from a Spanish silver coin or cob: faint traces suggesting a cross from a Spanish coat of arms are visible to the unaided eye on both faces, and fine scratched guide lines on the reverse appear to be the maker’s layout marks for cutting the shape out of the hammered sheet.[luer-1994] The two Goodnow tablets published earlier are of the commoner, more widespread form, which makes Goodnow only the second site known to have produced both styles.[luer-1994]

An interior network, not a coastal one

Luer’s tally of forty-nine tablets with known provenance places eighteen in Zone 3, the Kissimmee region and its surroundings, and another fourteen in the interior half of Zone 4 around Lake Okeechobee.[luer-1994] Those thirty-two, with the rest of Zone 3, put almost 70 percent of all provenienced metal tablets in the greater Okeechobee-Kissimmee interior.[luer-1994] Metal tablets are therefore not principally a southwest Florida artifact; Luer reads the pattern as metal entering from the Atlantic coast, moving inland, and spreading from the interior westward, already worked into tablets and other objects.[luer-1994] This is the same east-to-interior movement Fairbanks had proposed for the coin beads, and Luer cites him for it.[luer-1994]

Both authors read the silver as salvage rather than trade. Griffin and Smith had separated the mound’s contents into traded goods, such as glass seed beads, mirror fragments and iron axes, which they matched against a list of trade items in a 1675 letter by the Bishop of Cuba, and salvaged silver, which accounts for the tablets, tube beads and coin beads.[griffin-smith-1948][luer-1994] Luer supports that reading with the sheer diversity of Florida tablets, which he says is inconsistent with a suggestion that blanks were manufactured in Cuba and traded to Florida chiefs, and observes that very little wrecked silver would be needed for every tablet known, since most are small and very thin.[luer-1994] That chiefs claimed salvaged metal first is suggested by Jonathan Dickinson, shipwrecked on the southeast coast in 1696, who recorded that the local casseekey took the castaways’ money and hid it privately in the bushes.[luer-1994]

Dating and the peoples involved

Luer places metal tablets in the 1600s and early 1700s, against John Goggin’s earlier hypothesis of an early 1500s date.[luer-1994] The Goodnow tablet is the anchor: its associated glass beads have been dated no earlier than AD 1650, and the mound’s bead assemblage as a whole carries a mean date of about AD 1700.[luer-1994] A cache at Mound Key containing two tablets, Florida coin beads and Punta Rassa Tear Drop Pendants points to the same window, since those pendants occur in late seventeenth-century contexts at Ocmulgee in Georgia and at Mission San Luis de Talimali.[luer-1994]

Tablets belong to what Goggin called the Glades Cult, a religious and political alliance network spanning the peninsula.[luer-1994] Luer links the regional variation in tablet shape and decoration to the tribal territories of the 1600s: the Ais and the Jororo in the northeastern and north-central parts of Zone 3, the Calusa on the Zone 4 coast, and possibly the Mayaimi in the Okeechobee interior.[luer-1994] He notes that these peoples held to their own religion tenaciously — a 1675 account still described “13 tribes of savage heathen” — and that repeated Spanish missionizing efforts in south Florida failed.[luer-1994] The near-absence of tablets along the Atlantic coast below Cape Canaveral has been read as the result of sustained Spanish salvage there, while metal carried inland stayed beyond Spanish reach and in Indigenous hands.[luer-1994]

References

Where this comes from

Evidence
corroborated — More than one independent source agrees.
Review
unverified — Drafted from sources but not yet checked by a volunteer.
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Sources

  1. Charles H. Fairbanks, Florida Coin Beads (The Florida Anthropologist 21:4, pp. 101-106) (1968) · secondary
  2. George M. Luer, A Third Ceremonial Tablet From the Goodnow Mound, Highlands County, Florida; With Notes on Some Peninsular Tribes and Other Tablets (The Florida Anthropologist 47:2, pp. 180-190) (1994) · secondary
  3. John W. Griffin and Hale G. Smith, The Goodnow Mound, Highlands County, Florida: Containing a Report on the Skipper Site, Highlands County (Contributions to the Archaeology of Florida, No. 1) (1948) · official

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