A Microhistory of an Ancestral Muskogean Town and Narratives of Early Indigenous-Colonizer Dynamics in Southern Appalachia
Author(s): Jacob Holland-Lulewicz
Year: 2025
Summary
This is an abstract from the "Building a Better Chronology for Fifteenth–Eighteenth-Century Eastern North America through Radiocarbon Dating and Collaborative Research Agendas" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.
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The King site in northwestern Georgia is one of the most fully excavated 16<sup>th</sup> century Indigenous towns in the southeastern United States. Home to ancestors of the Muscogee (Creek) peoples, King serves as an analytical microcosm to explore the direct and indirect impacts of the earliest encounters between Indigenous peoples and Spanish colonizers. Potentially the location of the town of Piachi, whose residents engaged with both De Soto (1540) and Pardo (1566), the King site is estimated to have existed for no more than 50 years, between c. AD 1525-1575. These estimates, however, are based almost completely on Indigenous artifact typologies, the presence of certain European materials, and an analysis of architectural lifespans. Because of the importance of the King site in understanding both the conditions preceding contact with colonizers, as well as the impacts of these interactions on livelihoods, we undertake an absolute dating program to reveal the microhistorical processes underlying these critical encounters. Using c. 70 new AMS dates from architectural features, combined with high-resolution dendrochronological analyses of house posts, we reconsider the internal history of the King site and use these new temporalities to recast narratives of Indigenous-colonizer dynamics and subsequent population movements across the region.
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Cite this Record
A Microhistory of an Ancestral Muskogean Town and Narratives of Early Indigenous-Colonizer Dynamics in Southern Appalachia. Jacob Holland-Lulewicz. Presented at The 90th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. 2025 ( tDAR id: 509417)
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Record Identifiers
Abstract Id(s): 50426