Reconsidering the Impacts of Late Mississippian Chiefdoms on Early Spanish Entradas: A View from Western North Carolina

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Late Mississippian world was populated with several chiefly polities competing for regional dominance in a constantly shifting socio-political landscape. In the mid-sixteenth century, two Spanish entradas, led by Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo, would become entangled in this competitive landscape, attempting to bring late Medieval European socio-political world views into an Indigenous American system. The Soto and Pardo expeditions have often been characterized by scholars as a particularly disruptive series of events which altered the trajectory of Indigenous history. This paper instead explores how Indigenous leaders accepted the appearance of Europeans in the Mississippian world and recenters native perspectives concerning the events of the sixteenth-century. Using the Late Mississippian landscape of Western North Carolina as an example, this paper reconsiders the impacts of these encounters, not as an early destructive colonial event, but rather a series of interactions which would enable native leaders to reorganize and assert their political power and prestige through their interaction with Soto and Pardo. This paper uses archaeological evidence, including radiocarbon dating, to challenge early Spanish texts and to destabilize the European historical narrative of the sixteenth-century Southeast, demonstrating the power of Indigenous political systems within early contact studies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• *SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40162.0