The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Exploration of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568

Preface to First Edition

Preface to First Edition My first attempt to answer some of the questions that have led me to write this book was in 1963-64, when I was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina. At that time I was struggling to develop a theoretical framework I could use to make sense of the Catawba Indians of South Carolina. Trained as a social anthropologist, I found myself doing research on the Catawbas not so much to answer a question I had asked, but more because fieldwork was required for the Ph.D. in social anthropology and, as it so happened, funds had become available for someone to do fieldwork on the Catawbas. It did not take long for me to see that I would not be able to do the kind of research on the Catawbas that social anthropologists had done on more exotic people in far-flung parts of the world. Having spent my childhood in a very small and very rural town in Kentucky, I found that the Catawbas in many respects resembled people who were already familiar to me. What was interesting about the Catawbas, it seemed to me, was the history that had made them what they were. But this put me into another dilemma. I had not been trained as a historian. I have always been ambivalent about the book based on this researchThe Catawba Nation (1970). I knew at the time the book was published that many questions about the Catawbas remained unanswered. But I felt that I had gone some distance in developing an approach to understanding them and other native peoples in the Southeast. I understood, for example, the fallacies in the attempts of James Mooney, Frank Speck, and John R. Swanton to classify the native peoples of the Southeast into quasi-linguistic xi groups established largely on the assumption that people who were similar in their languages were also similar in their culture and even in their genes. In these schemes, the Catawbas were classified as "Eastern Siouans" along with an extensive list of other peoples on the basis of flimsy and erroneously used evidence. I could not proceed in my research without some kind of organizing framework, but it was with no great confidence that I used A. L. Kroeber's classification of North American Indian cultures, which was based on natural areas. Like many anthropologists before him, Kroeber realized that the cultures of preindustrial people have been powerfully shaped by their environments, and that this could provide the basis for a classification on surer grounds than those proposed by Mooney, Speck, and Swanton. Along with using Kroeber's classification as a "point of departure," I also advocated quite another way of apprehending the Catawbas and their neighbors. Both in the early historical literature and in the preliminary archaeological information that had been accumulated by the late I 960s, it appeared that societies of two levels of complexity had existed in the area where the Catawbas lived. Using terms coined for quite different purposes by Joffre Coe and Elman R. Service, I referred to these two levels of societies as "hill tribes" and "chiefdoms." The fonner were the societies of the Carolina Piedmont, and the latter were the Mississippian societies of the Wateree and Pee Dee rivers. I realized that the Catawbas were ultimately to be understood within the context of these chiefdoms and tribes, and within the context of a broadly conceived social history, but in 1970 my thinking had not gone beyond these realizations. I was also cognizant of the fact that several Spanish explorers had penetrated the interior of the Southeast in the sixteenth century, but I had no idea of where they had gone. And when I tried to make connections between the activities and observations of these sixteenth-century Spaniards and the Catawbas I had come to know, I could make none. I was simply not able to evaluate or use this body of information. xii Preface The Juan PardoExpeditions ...