Like most practitioners of the sometimes ambiguous discipline of historical archaeology, I have applauded the increasing trend in the social and historical sciences to blur traditional interdisciplinary boundaries. Paul Hoffman’s book is a dazzling example of the best kind of this new scholarly work, transcending but at the same time integrating the expected boundaries of narrative history, anthropology, archaeology, and geography.
This book does not just provide a detailed and rigorously documented narrative and sociopolitical history of what has been a greatly underestimated epoch in the Euro-American past. It also explores the impact of two inaccurate legends that arose during the 1520s on both the course of European colonization in the American Southeast and the subsequent historiography of the region.
The first of these legends is that of the mythical land of Chicora, perpetrated by Lucas Vásquez de Allyon between 1521 and 1526. Allyon claimed that a mineral-rich, fertile, and populous region was located at about 32 degrees north latitude—approximately the same as that of Andalucía in Spain—containing plants, animals, and climate that replicated Andalucía’s. This appealing but erroneous claim was coupled with another put forth by Giovanni da Verrazano, who reported that an “inland sea,” an arm of the Pacific Ocean, reached nearly to the outer banks of North Carolina at about 40 degrees north latitude. This was the perfect candidate for a water route to the Orient, a search that dominated European exploration of the Americas during the early sixteenth century.
Hoffman shows that the combination of a rich new Andalucía and a way to the Orient was so alluring that it governed the activities of Spain, France, and England in southeastern North America until nearly the end of that century. Its effect was to concentrate European efforts between 32 degrees and 40 degrees north latitude until the confrontation of myth-based expectations and reality transformed the reputation of La Florida to that of an unproductive backwater. Much of this contradiction, Hoffman argues, was a consequence of historiographic and cartographic errors. Few histories have underscored as effectively as Hoffman’s the importance of using sources in a chronological sequence. We learn the danger of assuming that differences between sources are the result of confusion by the authors. Hoffman shows instead that historical discrepancies may be both clues to and parts of some larger story not always directly accessible through surface analysis.
This is a wonderful book, informing not only the history of what was literally a world-transforming era but also the intellectual history of the social sciences in America. One geographical-archaeological project in search of San Miguel del Gualdape has already been initiated as a result of Hoffman’s study, demonstrating the tangible benefits that the deconstruction of traditional intellectual boundaries and the reconstruction of a social science of the past can have for us all.
