Index
Marvin D. Jeter 189 account of their powers and activities. There are some indications that they were recognized only or mainly on the individual-village level, that they were closely associated with warriors (and feasted with them on dog flesh on special occasions),and that there was at least a ceremonial seating arrangement of chief-elders-warriors-common people.73 There were probably clans organized into moieties, with the village-chief position inherited in the male line; villages were apparently generally autonomous, although pan-village consensus could be sought in important matters.74 Along with at least one former believer in the "Quapaw phase,"75 1 have contended for some time that we do not really know what the Quapaw archaeological/artifactual record looks like, and think that much of what had been called "Quapaw" may actually be attributable to Tunicans and/ or others.76 We have some renewed hopes, though, that a Quapaw assemblage from somewhere in the 1700-1750 period may soon be identified.77 Meanwhile, most Arkansas archaeologists have turned to the ethnically/ linguistically neutral term "Menard complex" as a label for these protohistoric to early historic ArkansasValley assemblages.78 Tunicans. A somewhat stronger case for time depth in the lower Mississippi and/or Arkansas valleys can be made with regard to the Tunicans. For the time of the Soto entrada, Jeffrey Brain has long argued that the village called Quizquiz, encountered in 1541 near the MississippiRiver in present northwest Mississippi,was a Tunica settlement.79 There are a few linguistic clues that the powerful chiefdom of Pacaha, in northeast Arkansas , may have been Tunican.80 Some have argued that the province of "Coligua" (near North Little Rock, they believed; but in the Hudson reconstruction it is near Batesville, northeast of central Arkansas) was probably the protohistoric Koroa (Coroa).81 The latter are believed by some, on very slender evidence, to have been Tunican speakers.82 Kidder concurred on the "Coligua = Koroa" possibility, and also has suggested that the Kinkead-Mainard and Garden Bottoms archaeological remains might relate to the Koroa.83 It is generally agreed that the Soto-documented settlement of "Tanico," in the province of "Cayas," somewhere in western Arkansas,was Tunican. Swanton and Dickinson placed it at Hot Springs, but Hudson puts it in the Garden Bottomslocality.84 During the French contact period much later, Marquette and Jolliet in 1673 reported (at second hand) that up the Arkansas Valley from the Akansea-Quapaw settlements were those of groups including the "Tanikoua " and "Akoroa," who are believed to have been Tunica and Koroa.At 190 From Prehistory through Protohistory to Ethnohistory least in the account of the La Salle expedition of 1682 (which did not mention the Arkansas Valley situation), the Tunica group (refugees?) reported by hearsay in the Vicksburgvicinity were characterized as enemies of the Akansea-Quapaw and the (probably Natchezan) Taensa.85 The same expedition reported a group of Koroa living near the Natchez.86 Subsequent accounts in the 1680s and 1690s mention names closely resembling those of the Tunica or Koroa in or near southeast Arkansas, but they are not documented in the Arkansas Valley after 1673, and seem to have completely left Arkansas by about 1700, moving southward down the lower valley.87 Tunicans, apparently displaced, were observed in the Vicksburgvicinity in 1700 and said to have had round houses, with cane lathing or wattle and mud-plaster daub, covered (roofed?) with "straw."88 At least, this is a generic southeastern and LMV house type, in contrast to the Quapaw longhouses. Round houses may have been a winter form used by people who had rectangular houses in warmer weather. Another French source of 1700 described the Tunica in the same locality as having seven "hamlets " with "50 or 60 small cabins."89 Accounts of their later southward movements have been summarized by Brain.90 A sketch painted by Dumont de Montignybetween 1728 and 1742 shows a Tunica village with rectangular houses, but this may be an artistic convention or might represent Houma houses taken over by Tunicans.91 If one assumes that Spanish-contacted settlements and provinces of the 1540s, such as Quizquiz, Pacaha, Coligua, and Tanico, were indeed Tunican , then a picture of populous, and in some cases powerful, Tunican chiefdoms can be inferred, along with connections to early-middle protohistoric and late prehistoric archaeological sites and phases. There is pathetically little information, though, about late protohistoric Tunicans and their lifeways in the northern LMV. While conceding that the early...
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