Hernando de Soto witnessed the fragility of it all on his entrada in 1539-43, his passage and the swirl of historical circumstances to follow bringing down the curtain on the larger purely native history of the Southeast. Native historic-period ‘chiefdoms’ or ‘confederacies’ described in European accounts may or may not have been typical of the earlier Mississippian
Figure 8 View of Moundville’s plaza and perimeter mounds.
Period. There was great variability in their subsistence base, historical trajectories, and linguistic background. Many Southeastern polities were made up of Muskogean speakers. But far to the west were Caddoan speakers. In the Midwest, perhaps around Cahokia, Siouan languages might have been prevalent. Even farther north, around the Great Lakes, Algonquian and Iroquoian speakers predominated.
In any event, it seems likely that various colonial-era polities, from the Natchez of southern Mississippi to the Powhatan of northern Virginia, created powerful governments based on ancient principles. Like them, great native confederacies and proto-states, such as the League of the Iroquois, were not mere reactions to European contact. Instead, the political, ritual, and communal diversity of ancient forerunners, from the Hopewellian Scioto valley and insular Coles Creek provinces to proto-urban greater Caho-kia, indicates that an archaeological understanding of the complexity of eastern Woodlands history needs to be understood in similar terms as those known to historical accounts: as ancient contacts, colonies, wars, alliances, and identity formations. Understood in that way, the ancient history of the eastern Woodlands has immediate and sometimes-profound implications for native and non-native people today and is essential for any fuller appreciation of world history.
See also: Agriculture: Social Consequences; Americas, Central: Lower Central America; Craft Specialization; Exchange Systems; Image and Symbol; New World, Peopling of; Plant Domestication; Ritual, Religion, and Ideology; Social Inequality, Development of.
World History
