Points of Contact: The Archaeological Landscape of Hernando de Soto in Georgia

Through enhanced investigation of two sixteenth-century Native communities this project sought to better predict the location and character of sites associated with earliest Spanish exploration in the Southeast, specifically those touched by Hernando de Soto's initial 1540 trek through present day Georgia. Events associated with Europe's trans-Atlantic expansion, including their implications for indigenous Native American societies, remain an important and fertile area of scholarship (Galloway 2005). Two centuries of Spanish influence, beginning at least by 1513, makes the southeastern United States one of the ideal laboratories for pursuing pertinent research (Hudson and Tesser 1994; Milanich and Milbrath 1991; Thomas 1990). Tremendous progress has been made toward mining the body of surviving records but understanding of specific events is still rudimentary. Therefore, archaeology is a critical and underdeveloped source of relevant information (Hudson 1997, 2005b; Hudson et al, 1984). Consensus on the value of continuing research settles around four main payoffs: 1) improved understanding of the Spanish strategy of exploration and colonization in the "borderlands" of North America, 2) reconstruction of the immediate pre-contact cultural and natural landscape of the Southeast, 3) development of a regional case study of the implications of initial inter-cultural contact, and 4) more precisely dating and locating associated events. This project contributes in each respect. Two prominent exploratory ventures occurred in the area of Georgia before 1550. The earliest was the failed colonizing effort of Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon, who in 1526 established his ill-fated settlement on the central coast of Georgia (Hoff nan 1990, 1994). The other was the entrada of Hernando de Soto that brought a small army across the state's present territory in 1540 (Hudson et al. 1984; Swanton 1985). There is as much or more archaeological evidence in Georgia of Ayllon's two-month presence on the coast, albeit indirect (Pearson 1977; Thomas 1993), as there is for De Soto's springtime trek through the area. In fact, the full 400-mile stretch of the presently favored De Soto route (Hudson 1997; Hudson et al. 1984), between present day Tallahassee and North Carolina's highlands, was an archaeological vacuum of compelling evidence for early sixteenth-century contact before our work began (Braley 1995; Hudson et al. 1991; Smith 1987; Little 2008). The two projects initiated by Fernbank Museum of Natural History since 2006 offer significant potential to rectify that situation. In the search for a seventeenth century Spanish mission, Fernbank recovered unprecedented evidence of pre-1550 contact along the lower Ocmulgee River in interior, southeastern Georgia, outside the most favored corridor proposed for De Soto's trek (Hudson 1997; Hudson et al. 1984) (Figure 1). The other project has identified a major town in the Native sociopolitical province called Capachequi, visited by De Soto in March, 1540 and described by his chroniclers (Clayton et al, 1993; Hudson et al. 1984). That site is located in southwestern Georgia along the Chickasawhatchee Creek drainage, in an area that is among the least contested locations for the entrada's path. Those discoveries present the prospect of anchoring De Soto's route at two points along a lengthy segment presently lacking any evidence. Doing so would provide an unprecedented basis for reconstructing a landscape, introducing new precision into the historical record, and charting the effects of contact.