Description
The Mocama were a Native American people who lived in the coastal areas of what are now northern Florida and southeastern Georgia. Their territory extended from about the Altamaha River in Georgia to south of St. Augustine, Florida, covering the Sea Islands and the inland waterways, including the mouth of the St. Johns River in present-day Jacksonville and the Intracoastal. Archaeological research dates human habitation in the area eventually known as the Mocama Province to at least 2500 BC. Due to severe population losses from infectious disease and warfare with northern Indian tribes and the English from South Carolina, the Mocama polity disintegrated in the 17th century.
Language
A Timucua group, they spoke the dialect known as Mocama, the best-attested dialect of the Timucua language.
Culture
Archaeologists have been able to piece together clues to their life, both in what they unearth and in the writings of the French and Spanish who lived among them. There were just piles of shells from the oysters they ate and burial mounds where people were laid to rest after often elaborate ceremonies. Among those mounds, they found a few scattered treasures: tiny cobs of corn, shell arrowheads and decorations, shards of pottery. They liked to smoke tobacco. They drank tea made from yaupon holly leaves, a tree found throughout Jacksonville. The black brew had caffeine in it, and was also used to make you vomit, for a ceremonial purging effect. They used herbs for healing. They lived in palm-thatched huts in scattered villages that also had a large central hall. It was a matrilineal society, meaning that power and inheritance and clan status moved through the mother's side of the family. Female chiefs were not the norm, but they were not uncommon.