Jerald T. Milanich is Curator in Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History and Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida. His ten previous books include Florida Archaeology (1980), The Early Prehistoric Southeast (Garland, 1985) and First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the United States, 1492-1570 (1989). With the exception of a year's post-doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution, Jerald Milanich has spent some thirty years in Florida researching the nature of past and present American Indian societies of the American southeast.