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The de Soto expedition (1539 to 1542) marked the ¤rst major, organized Spanish incursion into the interior Southeast of the present-day United States. Although it stands as a watershed event in the Contact era, smaller European forays had touched down numerous times along coastal areas prior to de Soto. From his landing onward, however, European material culture became increasingly available to Native Americans of the Southeast as processes of exploration and colonization accelerated. Most of the interaction early on was with the Spanish, although the French made an ill-fated attempt to colonize eastern Florida at Fort Caroline in 1562. It took well over a century after de Soto before the French and English began their successful penetration into the Southeast. Indigenous societies encountered by the Spanish in northern Georgia are recognized by archaeologists as part of the Lamar Culture that also covered portions of Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Florida (Hally and Rudolph 1986; Williams and Shapiro 1990). From a typological viewpoint, Lamar constitutes a late (a.d. mid–1300s onward) Mississippian regional expression. In other words, Lamar groups were dependent upon corn-beans-squash agriculture, were often—though not always—organized into chiefdoms, and participated in long-distance exchange networks for the acquisition of ceremonial objects that display widely shared iconographies. Old World diseases would rapidly deplete these groups in the latter sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but until that time the Spanish found themselves dealing with hierarchical polities sustaining relatively signi¤cant population levels. The King site in northwest Georgia is one of the most thoroughly documented village-sized Lamar occupations. It dates to the mid–sixteenth century and might have been the settlement of Piachi in the Coosa chiefdom. There is some question as to whether de Soto himself actually passed through the King 2 Lithic Technology and the Spanish Entrada at the King Site in Northwest Georgia Charles R. Cobb and Dino A. Ruggiero site. In any event, European goods from the settlement are very limited in number and restricted to mortuary contexts. In the Southeast, the King site sits at the chronological threshold of the Contact period. For this reason, it represents a valuable case for examining initial changes in material culture resulting from the in®ux of European objects. Our study of the lithic assemblage from the site incorporates both household and mortuary contexts. It demonstrates that early access to European goods, primarily tools that had functional equivalents in stone, were found only with burials and had negligible impact on lithic technologies. Interestingly, though, European objects were restricted to so-called ®intknapper burials, indicating some form of privileged access for those individuals. THE COOSA POLITY The King site is located on the Coosa River in northwest Georgia (Figure 2.1). Although the attribution of the King site to the town of Piachi may be problematic , there is little doubt that this occupation falls well within the con¤nes of the polity the Spaniards referred to as Coosa. Marvin Smith (2000) points out that the term “Coosa” has three referents: a large alliance of chiefdoms as described here; the core chiefdom of Coosa within this confederation; and the paramount town in the chiefdom. Archaeological and ethnohistorical research indicates that at its fullest extent Coosa represented a paramount chiefdom encompassing smaller polities extending from eastern Tennessee into central Alabama (Hudson et al. 1985; M. Smith 2000). Three major Spanish excursions came into contact with Coosa: 1) Hernando de Soto’s expedition in 1540; 2) a detachment from Tristán de Luna’s effort to colonize the Gulf Coast in 1560; and 3) Juan Pardo’s extended expedition of 1567–1568. None of these visits was intended as an effort to colonize the Coosa area, and their most dramatic effect cumulatively was likely the decimation of Native Americans by European-borne diseases. The de Luna group, which included veterans of de Soto’s journey, found towns much more reduced and impoverished than their memory allowed (Swanton 1922:231), perhaps re®ecting the spread of pathogens from both de Soto’s expedition twenty years earlier and from intermittent Spanish contact with coastal groups. After Pardo’s exploration, the Spaniards ended their efforts at systematic exploration of the interior Southeast. It is not until the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the documentary record picks up again in any great detail, with the Creek, Cherokee, and other well-known historical groups. By that time Coosa had ceased to exist as a formal polity and many of the towns...

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