Anthropological Contributions to the Cause of the Georgia Martyrs

Anthropologists are routinely approached with seemingly odd requests, often, as they say, on Friday afternoons just as you are leaving the office. A farmer turning up bones that might be human (a potential medico-legal case but more often a domesticated animal), a granddaughter who inherited a house in which she found a human skull in a box in an upstairs closet (an old medical specimen), purported fossilized remains (the ubiquitous dinosaur), or pottery or “arrowheads” someone would like identified (unfortunately usually of limited anthropological significance) are relatively common occurrences. More often than not these contacts do not develop into enduring research projects, and remain as interesting anecdotes we share with family and friends about the eccentricities of being an anthropologist. However, early in 2003 one of us (CMS) received an email about the decapitated head of a Franciscan priest. The email came from Father Conrad Harkins, Vice Postulator for the Canonization Cause of Fray Pedro de Corpa and His Companions, inquiring as to my interest in evaluating the claim that a human cranium recovered from excavations at an old Spanish mission along the Georgia coast belonged to a Franciscan killed during an uprising among the indigenous converts in the 16th century. As I had recently completed doctoral research on skeletal variation among indigenous populations from Spanish La Florida, “need” seemingly matched “expertise” rather well and I was quite intrigued by the mystery of it all, having read about the martyrdom of the Franciscans in Georgia during the course of general historical contextualization of my dissertation research (Geiger, 1937; Oré, 1936). Needless to say I agreed to consider the evidence.