Alabama and the Borderlands: From Prehistory To Statehood

5 Jeffrey P. Brain - The Archaeology of the Hernando de SotoExpedition

5 The Archaeology of Jeffrey P. Brain the Hernando de Soto Expedition Any attempt to place the 1539-43 expedition of Hernando de Soto in historical and ethnohistorical perspective must treat the motives for the exploration against the background of European traditions, events, and mentalities, as well as both the contemporary and subsequent impact of its startling appearance among the American Indian societies. The impacts of such contact between peoples of two fundamentally different cultural traditions are of most interest and concern to anthropologists, but to pursue such studies, it is critically important to identify the archaeological contexts, which means that we must be accurate in determining points of contact between the army and the Indians. In short, we must reconstruct the route of Soto accurately. Historians, ethnographers , and geographers have worked on this problem for generations and in recent years have been joined by archaeologists as we begin to develop our discipline and data base vis-a-vis this problem. At the outset, we must acknowledge that, at present, we cannot trace the route of Soto with precision. We can trace his movements only within a reasonable approximation. Valid theories may have been presented, but none has yet been proved. Of course, archaeologists deal in small particulars, and these must be closely correlated before we can be satisfied. It must also be noted that while historical analysis may identify a probable site, archaeological investigation is necessary to prove it. ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE HERNANDO DE SOTO EXPEDITION Throughout Soto's route, considerable problems beset the coincidence of historical and archaeological data, which is not surprising when the scale of the expedition is measured against the vast area that it traversed. It is a needle-in-a-haystack problem, and although we have found the needle, we do not know exactly where it was hidden in the haystack. Apparently, as the Soto chronicler Garcilaso notes several times, the army marched without the benefit of precise "navigational" fixes, although there were sailors in its ranks.l Thus even the participants had little idea where they were at any time and, therefore, their geographic references in the unknown land are almost impossibly vague. Compounding the problem is the fact that the objectives of the expedition were different from ours. They were not as interested in where they were, or had been, as in where they were going; they were not as interested in what they found (they realized practically nothing from their daring endeavors) as in what they hoped to find. Their directions, when given, were generally expressed in broad segments of the compass. The result is that while historical interest has raised expectations, our hope of tangible archaeological recovery from the immense landscape is all but forlorn-but not impossible. For centuries, scholars have speculated on the expedition's route. When all serious speculations and hypotheses are amalgamated , they reduce to little more than a broad swath across the map of the Southeastern states (figure 5-1). Forty-five years ago, therefore , the United States De Soto Commission, under the chairmanship of the distinguished ethnologist and historian John R. Swanton, was formed to make the first major attempt at defining the entire route of the expedition and placing it in native contexts. Its conclusions were to be the definitive and official determination, and its final report was issued on the quadricentennial of the landing of the army.2 It attempted to penetrate the cloud of speculation which had accumulated and, in a tour de force of analysis and interpretation, present a closely defined hypothesis. However important its research , which serves as the base for all modem Soto studies, its conclusions are not sacrosanct. It is now conceded that many of the commission's conclusions are far from final, and as new evidence accumulates, it becomes increasingly clear that many reconstructed segments (practically the whole route) are in need of revision. The commission's interpretations were perhaps the best it could make with the evidence at hand, but the precision that it attempted was not warranted by the documents' vague information. Nor were 97 Jeffrey P. Brain FIGURE 5-1. Official Route of the De Soto Expedition Commission, Superimposed on an Amalgamated Field of Alternate Hypotheses sufficient and reliable archaeological data available at that time-or even now.3 However, Swanton was aware of deficiencies in many reconstructions of the route and he left the door open for archaeology ,4 which...