Spanish Florida, which extended into and included the territory of present-day Georgia, has for many years been largely ignored in histories of both English and Spanish America. Situado and Sabana, a groundbreaking study of how things worked in the Spanish colony of La Florida, addresses that oversight. It examines the mixed support system by which Spain maintained an economically unprofitable but strategic colony on the contested east coast of North America for two centuries. The system combined royal subventions, private investments, and drafted labor.

The Spanish Maritime Colonies model that emerges from Bushnell's close examination of the seventeenth-century Southeast is dynamic and essentially secular; it resembles but little the Spanish Borderlands model derived from the isolated mission presidios of the eighteenth-century Southwest.

Situado and Sabana answers many questions about the Hispanic frontier in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the food grown and eaten, religious and burial practices, forced Indian labor, Native American customs persisting in the missions, the provisions of garrisons and soldiers, and how goods were brought into and out of the missions. We learn about the Franciscan missionaries: what they ate, how they dressed, what church goods they had, and how they got them. Bushnell also explores the encounter of the Hispanic hierarchy of hidalgos, soldiers, and farmer-settlers with the equally stratified Native American hierarchy.

Bushnell places St. Augustine and the chain of missions that extended northward to Mission Santa Catalina on St. Catherines Island, Georgia, within Spain's grand colonization scheme for the entire New World. Excellent maps help the reader to visualize the comings and goings of missionaries, Native American neophytes, and Spanish administrators, as well as the growth and decline of the missionary system in the American Southeast.