The Calusa: Linguistic and Cultural Origins and Relationships (2014)

The Calusa: Linguistic and Cultural Origins and Relationships. JULIAN GRANBERRY. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 2011. 120 pp., 3 ill., 9 tables, references, and index. $30.00 (paper), ISBN: 9780-8173-1751-5; $30.00 (e-book), ISBN: 978-0-8173-8579-8.Julian Granberry's The Calusa comprehensively and thoroughly analyzes the complete corpus of the Calusa language. One would suspect that a work which encompasses all known words and forms of words of a language would be a massive tome; yet that is not the case for this short, nuanced, and technical volume. Coming in at just under 80 pages of text, this book examines the phonological, morphological, and semiological aspects of the Calusa language while striking a nice balance between regional archaeology and Calusa ethnography.The Calusa (of southwestern Florida) themselves are fairly well known through artifacts, settlement studies, and ethnographic research, yet their origins and relationships to other Floridian Indians remains enigmatic (pp. 3-4). Granberry starts from this perspective and builds a case that the Calusa origins can be known linguistically, though perhaps not archaeologically. As Granberry notes (pp. 7-8), archaeologists, cultural anthropologists, and physical anthropologists tend to examine cultures and people groups based on their own limited fields to the exclusion of the other subdisciplines, and no attempt had been made prior to Granberry's to fuse Calusa area archaeology with Calusa linguistics to try to answer the question of Calusa origins and relationships.Granberry begins his discussion of the Calusa language by examining all known words, phrases, toponyms, and Spanish translations that are extant in Spanish journals and diaries of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century missionaries. This presentation of the Calusa language data comprises Chapter 4, which lays the groundwork for the following chapter's discussion of the Calusa/Tunica (of northeastern Louisiana) language parallels. As Granberry states (p. 27), the discussion of Chapter 5 may be viewed as esoteric to the nonlinguist, by which he refers to the pronunciation of the Calusa/Tunica phonemes and the grammatical constructs that comprise the language(s). The tables in Chapter 5 are especially helpful to the nonlinguist because they clearly and concisely demonstrate the parallels without being onerous recitations of confusing data. Furthermore, he is careful to include several words, phrases, and toponyms in his discussion and compare these with other Florida Indian groups to show that the Calusa language more closely parallels the Tunica language than any of the neighboring Florida groups. He accomplishes this through ethnographic details from Spanish missionary journals and diaries and through modem research by linguists.The linguistic origins and relationship of the Calusa takes center stage in this book, but Granberry delves into the archaeology as well. Granberry's presentation of the archaeological data focuses on the necessary recent and basic (albeit limited) archaeological literature. Granberry relies heavily on a few works of previous researchers, most notably books by Jerald Milanich (and coauthors), Rebecca Saunders, and Christopher Hays, and only briefly mentions the work of several others, as their conclusions support the points he is making in the text. This may seem to gloss over other relevant archaeological literature on the Calusa, but Granberry is careful to note (p. xvii) that he has included all recent archaeological and linguistic data on the Calusa, and we the reader must take him at his word. The archaeological data is used to highlight the connections he is attempting to make linguistically between the Calusa and Tunica people. Therefore, an exhaustive catalog of artifacts and settlement studies is not necessary for the present volume because the linguistic data is bolstered by the archaeological data.Granberry does three things very well in this book. …