Coosa: The Rise and Fall of a Southeastern Mississippian Chiefdom (review)

Coosa: The Rise and Fall of a Southeastern Mississippian Chiefdom. By Marvin T. Smith. (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000. xix + 146 pp., foreword, preface, figures, plates, references, index. $49.95 cloth.)

Coosa had a long and varied history. It first popped up in the documentary record in the various narratives of the de Soto expedition, which in the 1540s traveled through what today is the southeastern United States. At the time, Coosa was one of the most powerful chiefdoms in the region, controlling much of present-day north Georgia. Europeans did not return to the region for almost another century and a half, and the second batch of documents that reported on Coosa explorers described the chiefdom as one among many in what came to be called the Creek Confederacy. What had happened to Coosa?

Marvin T. Smith has blended archaeology and ethnohistory to describe and interpret the rise, dissolution, and relocation of Coosa between 900 and 1800. His treatment of the complex Mississippian period is clear and concise, but his interpretation of Coosa's first contact with the Spanish is a bit too tidy. While Smith considers the de Soto narratives as contradictory but nonetheless useful sources, other scholars would disagree. For example, in Choctaw Genesis, 1500–1700 (1995), Patricia K. Galloway applied the tools of literary criticism to the narratives and raised serious questions about their historical utility and veracity. Engaging in a complicated historiographical debate over sources might have untracked Smith from writing for a broad audience, but readers would benefit from a clearer sense of the contested nature of the sources on which he relies for the early contact history of Coosa.

Europeans returned to Coosa again in the eighteenth century, and they observed a place that had fallen on hard times. The centralized chiefly government, moundbuilding, elite burials, and manufacture of sumptuary goods that had characterized early Coosa had ceased in the aftermath of first contact. Disease, the collateral disruptions that came with colonization, and perhaps unknowable indigenous factors had devastated the chiefdom. The small dispersed towns that remained came to constitute a portion of the Creek Confederacy.

Having established what can be known about Coosa from the documentary record, Smith proceeds to fill in the blanks by examining the archaeology of upstate Georgia and eastern Tennessee. After the collapse of the chiefdom, the survivors of Coosa migrated down the river valleys they inhabited toward English and Spanish settlements on the Atlantic Coast. As they moved, their culture changed to reflect the absence of chiefly government and all of its trappings. Through changes in pottery decoration, Smith traces their movements in a very precise fashion. Guns, metal tools, and other European items began to appear in the archaeological record. While such goods changed lifestyles, they also reignited such older forms of political economy as elite burials, and the sumptuary trade reemerged among the descendants of Coosa. After the region's Native inhabitants recovered from the disasters of first contact and had integrated European goods into their lives, the cycle of chiefly government swung back to the side of centralization, hierarchy, and integration. Abihka, one of the towns in the original Coosa chiefdom, however, had usurped Coosa's place as the preeminent center of trade and power in the region.

Marvin Smith has achieved a remarkable fusion of history and archaeology that, in the case of Coosa, suggests what happened across the South between the first Spanish entradas and later European colonization. The protohistoric period stands as a serious gap in the ethnohistory of the region, and Coosa succeeds in making sense of this difficult period. Accessible to scholars, students, and lay readers alike, the slim volume is an important work that should inspire similar studies of the protohistoric American South.