DaveWells.us

Apalachee Com­mu­nity House

This week­end, I decided to go visit Mis­sion San Luis. The site is only a cou­ple of miles from the FSU cam­pus, but I some­how hadn’t made it there before. Since the offi­cial Mis­sion San Luis web­site seems to be com­pletely dead at the moment, I shall pro­vide a very brief his­tory of the site:

1633: Span­ish Fran­cis­can fri­ars come to live among the Apalachee peo­ple.
1647: Non-Christian Apalachee revolt, killing Spaniards and burn­ing churches.
1656: The fri­ars and Apalachee attatched to Mis­sion San Luis move to what is now Tal­la­has­see. San Luis becomes the provin­cial cap­i­tal.
1704: Fear­ing raids by the British, the inhab­i­tants of Mis­sion San Luis burn the struc­tures and flee.
1983: The site of Mis­sion San Luis is pur­chased by the State of Florida. Archae­o­log­i­cal research and site recon­struc­tion begin.

The Mis­sion site seems to be very well man­aged. The visitor’s cen­ter and museum, while small, is very well done. In addi­tion to dis­play­ing and inter­pret­ing arti­facts, there are excel­lent dia­grams, recon­struc­tions, and inter­pre­ta­tions of the archae­o­log­i­cal work itself. One cool thing is a set of slid­ing glass panes that let you over­lay var­i­ous stages of exca­va­tion — and the asso­ci­ated data — on a plan view of the site. There are also recre­ations of two dig units in pro­file (as if you were stand­ing in the pit, look­ing at the wall), that show impor­tant fea­tures as well as some arti­facts in situ.

The site itself is also quite impres­sive. Com­plete recon­struc­tions have been done of the church, fri­ary, Apalachee com­mu­nity house (above), and a small Span­ish dwelling. The build­ings are fur­nished and appointed based on con­tem­po­rary accounts and records of what was removed from the orig­i­nal build­ings before they were burned. Exca­va­tion of the small Span­ish fort has recently been com­pleted, and appar­ently recon­struc­tion of that is in the works. There must be some good money com­ing in from pri­vate donors to fund all this work. Admis­sion to the site is free, and I can’t imag­ine that the state funds it this well. I’d wanted to ask about fund­ing at the visitor’s cen­ter, but it was closed by the time I thought of ask­ing. I wish more archae­o­log­i­cal sites could get this kind of support.

Guidon­ian Hand

I found some­thing very inter­est­ing on one of the inte­rior walls of the fri­ary — the painted hand at right. Sadly, there was no accom­pa­ny­ing expla­na­tion, and the visitor’s cen­ter was already closed when I dis­cov­ered it. Each joint of the hand is assigned a num­ber, and what appear to be solfege (do, re, mi, etc.) syl­la­bles. There are also lit­tle snip­pets of shape-note nota­tion next to the hand. I’ve never encoun­tered any­thing like this in my music stud­ies. Can any­one (musi­col­o­gists — hint, hint) tell me any­thing about this diagram?

Update: My dad iden­ti­fied this as a Guidon­ian hand, after Guido d’Arrezzo, an 11^th cen­tury musi­cian and teacher. I remem­ber talk­ing about Guido in music his­tory, but have no rec­ol­lec­tion of this dia­gram. I’ll have to see if I can find an expla­na­tion some­where. Also, I real­ized there’s no scale in the pho­to­graph — the hand is prob­a­bly 4–5 feet tall.