Chicasa and Soto: Toward a Continuum of Disentanglement

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The concept of "entanglement," when applied to the Native American colonial experience, usually assumes both an inevitability and magnitude that comes with historical hindsight. Such an assumption easily masks the fact that historical players did not act with this in mind and that encounters between Natives and newcomers were intrinsically variable and historically contingent. We argue that disentanglements are likewise variable and contingent and also shaped by the kind of entanglements from which they derive. Scholars often analyze the entrada of conquistadors such as Hernando de Soto as a single event, a single "entanglement," that resulted in a single kind of impact across the American South. We use archaeological and ethnohistorical evidence to examine and compare a first, short-lived event of contact between Hernando de Soto and the Indians of the Southeastern Mississippian polity known as Chicasa with other of Soto’s encounters in order to highlight the variations of encounters during the expedition and to gauge the degrees and variations of entanglements and disentanglements between Soto’s army and the people they encountered.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Disentanglement: Reimagining Early Colonial Trajectories in the Americas

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23148