Native American Responses to Spanish Contact and Colonialism in the American South

Summary

As it did elsewhere around the world, early Spanish exploration and colonization of the American South led to diverse forms of engagement, entanglement, diplomacy, and resistance by Native American groups. Community identity persisted in some places and in some instances, and it was transformed in others. Geopolitical relationships among towns and chiefdoms were altered in diverse ways, both because of colonial exploration, trade, settlement, and missionization, and because of Native American strategies for navigating new geopolitical landscapes and rapidly changing social geography of the colonial American South. This paper considers diverse outcomes to early stages of sixteenth-century Spanish contact and exploration and later stages of Spanish missionization and settlement in the 1600s and early 1700s, with reference to the cases of Cherokee towns in the southern Appalachians, the Calusa chiefdom and its neighbors in southern Florida, the Apalachee chiefdom in northern Florida, and sixteenth-century chiefdoms such as Coosa and Joara.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20917