Powhatan's Mantle: Indians in the Colonial Southeast, Revised and Expanded Edition

Aboriginal Population Movements in the Early Historic Period Interior Southeast

Aboriginal Population Movements in the Early Historic Period Interior Southeast marvin t. smith Spanish exploration was particularly hard on southeastern Indians. Natives were killed or conscripted for forced labor, stored food supplies were stolen, and new diseases were introduced by the Spanish explorers, particularly Hernando de Soto (1540) and his men. Later English settlers established an organized slave trade using Indian middlemen.1 The trauma of contact between Indians and Europeans during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries set in motion complex population movements. Using historical and archaeological data, this brief essay seeks to describe and explain these movements in the interior Southeast. The area to be considered includes the Valley and Ridge and piedmont portions of Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, and South Carolina, as well as portions of the Appalachian Summit of North Carolina. Chronologically, the period covered here stretches from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. This span of more than 150 years can be divided into three time segments, each with its own sources of data. Population movements that took place during the second half of the sixteenth century can be traced by two methods . Towns located by a reconstruction of the route of Hernando de Soto can be compared with towns visited a generation later by the Juan Pardo and Tristán de Luna expeditions.2 Other sixteenth-century movements can be demonstrated archaeologically. During the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, there were virtually no Europeans residing in the study area, and the lack of written records obliges scholars to rely solely on archaeological data in tracking possible population shifts. Finally, European explorers again penetrated the interior in the late seventeenth century and left us valuable records of population movements. Besides giving firsthand accounts of contemporary shifts, they also reported new locations of towns mentioned by de Soto and Luna. The sources do not suggest when these moves occurred or whether they took place in gradual stages or as single episodes. However, archaeological data allow us to con-    aboriginal population movements struct some inferences that can be tested by further archaeological research. Many of the reconstructed population movements presented here should be considered as testable hypotheses to be investigated further. The baseline knowledge of the location of aboriginal groups in the study area comes from the recent reconstruction of the routes of Hernando de Soto, Tristán de Luna, and Juan Pardo by Charles Hudson and his associates .3 Population centers include the upper Coosa drainage, the Oconee drainage, the Santee-Wateree drainage, the upper Tennessee River, the Little Tennessee River, the middle Coosa River, the upper Alabama River, and many other areas. Archaeological knowledge suggests many other areas of dense population, among them the lower Tallapoosa valley, the central Chattahoochee, the upper Savannah, and the Appalachian Summit area for a few examples.4 The expeditions of Luna and Pardo during the 1560s give us a further glimpse of the interior a few years after the de Soto entrada. Luna and Pardo visited many of the same towns as de Soto. Thus we know that Cofitachequi , Xuala, Chiaha, Coosa, Ulibahali, and probably Apica and Piachi remained in the same locations where de Soto had found them.5 The Luna expedition also allows us to locate the Napochie villages at the Citico and Audubon Acres sites near Chattanooga, Tennessee (fig. 1). Conspicuously absent, however, are the Tascaloosa towns of the upper Alabama River and the Talisi towns of the middle Coosa. Apparently the Tascaloosa chiefdom collapsed after the battle of Mabila in 1540, perhaps moving down the Alabama River. Archaeological research by Knight and Wilson suggests that the Talisi towns moved away from the Coosa River up Talladega Creek to such sites as Hightower village.6 By the beginning of the seventeenth century, archaeological data demonstrate more radical movements of people (see fig. 2). The Coosa chiefdom abandoned the upper Coosa drainage, moving downriver to the present Lake Weiss area of Alabama and later farther downstream.7 Similarly, the Mouse Creek towns along the Hiwassee River were abandoned, and I have suggested that these groups moved north to the Tennessee River proper, to such sites as Upper Hampton and De Armond that were occupied during the seventeenth century, based on the presence of diagnostic European trade goods.8 Later these people may have moved south to Hiwassee Island, where there is evidence of mid- to late seventeenth-century burials placed into earlier Woodland...