"Before Oglethorpe: Hispanic and Indian Cultures in the Southeast United States" Lesson Plan by Carmen Chaves Tesser and Charles Hudson in OAH Magazine of History (Vol. 5, No. 4, Spring 1991, pp. 43-46) Introduction Many of the materials employed in this lesson plan were developed by the participants in the 1990 NEH Summer Institute for College Teachers at the University of Georgia and refined by a subsequent NEH-funded institute for high school teachers. The lesson includes some preparatory activity on the students' part, a shared reading, suggested questions to be explored in classroom discussion, and a session utilizing maps. Preparatory Activities A. Employing the Hudson and Associates map published with this plan, a roadmap of the Southeastern United States, and a ruler, the teacher will demonstrate how to measure distances on a modern map. Students should familiarize themselves with the geography of the region. B. Using the dictionary and/or encyclopedia, students should define the following words in preparation for the shared reading. The words appear below in the same sequence as they will appear in the reading, although teachers may choose to arrange them in alphabetical order, divide them up among groups of students, or present them in a list for individual students. archeological Basques textual Erich von Daniken indigenous Thomas Jefferson Antebellum Hernando de Soto ethnocentric ethnography ideology sociology Moundbuilders Huguenots Israelites Enlightenment Carthaginian heresy Alexander the Great Satanism Welshmen scribe The Reading Archeological and textual research has revealed profound changes in indigenous societies in the Southeast between the time of the arrival of the Spaniards and the much later appearance of the English in the region. A perennial question in the history of the Southeast has been how this transformation occurred? To Antebellum historians, it seemed obvious that the huge earthen mounds and ornate Indian artifacts which were discovered in the region could not have been created by the indigenous people living there in the nineteenth century. Because of the prevailing ethnocentric ideology of the day and its romantic idiom, the most popular explanation was that they had been raised by a different and superior race of people--the Moundbuilders--who had occupied the land prior to the coming of the Indians. The Moundbuilders' racial identity and place of origin varied from one theorist to another. Some maintained that the mounds of the Southeastern United States had been constructed by ancient Israelites who somehow had found their way to the region. Others insisted that Carthaginians, or the army of Alexander the Great, Welshmen or Basques had constructed the impressive works. In our own day, Erich von Daniken's Chariots of the Gods asserted that the mounds were the handiworks of creatures from outer space. No less than Thomas Jefferson became involved in the issue. The author of the Declaration of Independence excavated an earthen mound found near his estate at Charlottesville, Virginia and, after examining its contents and strata, Jefferson concluded that it could have been constructed by Indians. His opinion was strongly seconded in 1873 by the pioneer archeologist, Charles Colcok Jones, Jr., when he published his Antiquities of the Southern Indians. Jones had read a translation of a first-hand chronicle of the Hernando de Soto expedition (1539-1543) to the Southeast and it was clear to the Spaniards' travels. De Soto and his men had encountered large and powerful native American societies. This thesis was confirmed in 1891 with the publication of a monumental report by the Bureau of American Ethnology, which concluded that the Southeastern mounds were the creations of the Indians themselves. Who were these indigenous engineers and where were their communities located when the Spanish first stumbled upon them? Few, if any, of the sixteenth-century Spanish explorers were much interested in matters we today would label ethnography or sociology. Indeed, these fields were defined long after De Soto's celebrated march. Quite a number of the later French and English explorers do exhibit such interests. The records of the Huguenots who attempted to establish a colony at the mouth of the St. John's River in Florida, for example, reveal their curiosity about the indigenous people they encountered there. This interest is even more evident in the documents of French and English observers in the late seventeenth century and throughout the eighteenth century. Under the influence of the Enlightenment, they became aware that people could differ rather fundamentally from Europeans in how they thought or lived without being guilty of heresy or Satanism, as had been suspected earlier. The only first-hand observers of the indigenous population of the Southeastern interior in the sixteenth century were, nevertheless, the Spaniards. They left us very little in the way of written observation of the customs and cultures they found. Consequently, most of our present understanding is based upon the work of archaeologists over the past fifty years, especially the most recent fifteen years. It was during the 1979-80 academic year that Charles Hudson, professor of anthropology and history at the University of Georgia, began collaborating with archaeologists Marvin Smith and Chester DePratter in an attempt to determine the route of the De Soto expedition. They quickly discovered that, if they relied solely on the Spanish narratives of the venture, it was possible to place the expedition almost anywhere in the region. Start wherever they might in most parts of the Southeast, the researchers found that there were streams, arable lands, and often archeological evidence of Indian settlement that was suggestive of the localities described by De Soto's men. A way out of this impasse presented itself when they began reading an account of the Spanish explorer Juan Pardo's expedition (1567-1568), written by his scribe and notary, Juan de la Bandera. As researchers poured through Bandera's history, it became clear to them that Pardo must have visited five of the same Indian towns that De Soto had reached earlier. Pardo arrived at each in precisely the same order as they had been encountered by De Soto's column and they lay in the same kinds of terrain. The Bandera document, moreover, is far more detailed than any of the narratives of the De Soto expedition for this segment of the route. Using Pardo's itinerary as described by Bandera, the research team retraced every possible route leading from Santa Elena (a Spanish post lately unearthed at Parris Island, South Carolina where Pardo's march began) northward to the Appalachian Mountains, which Bandera describes in detail. Scholars have known for some time now that an indigenous people called the Apalachee had been located in the vicinity of Tallahassee, Florida, and recent archeological finds demonstrate that some, if not all, of De Soto's men camped within what is now the city limits of the state's capital. In their effort to locate De Soto's route of march, therefore, Professor Hudson and his colleagues started in Tallahassee. Assuming a pace of no more that 17.5 miles per day for the Spaniards and employing geographical features mentioned in the documents, as well as known archeological indicators of early sixteenth-century habitations along the way, Hudson's group was able to reconstruct De Soto's path through Georgia all the way to what had been the town of Chiaha, now located on Zimmerman's Island in the French Broad River near present day Dandridge, Tennessee (see accompanying map). With the segment of the De Soto's route in hand, the researchers gained additional insight into the way the expedition behaved. They noted, for example, that De Soto and his party traveled a little more slowly than Pardo and that they were continually guided by Indians, who almost always followed clear trails. While De Soto's men might have wished to find precious metals, they had to find food. As a result, the Spaniards sought out the central towns of the most populous chiefdoms because it was there that food was either stored or could be easily cajoled or extorted from the inhabitants. Hudson's group has published their reconstruction of several segments of De Soto's march and research on the remainder is in varying stages of completion. One immediate benefit of this reconstruction is that the researchers have been able to make sense out of the movements and activities of another Spanish exploration--that of Tristan de Luna's men, who landed at Pensacola bay and penetrated the interior in 1559-1561. The routes of exploration followed by De Soto, Luna, and Pardo are intrinsically interesting. Their real importance, however, is that they provide a vital record for addressing some of the most significant questions about the period of 1568-1670, which Professor Hudson described as "the Great Black Hole of Southern History." Among those questions are: 1) What was the nature of the indigenous societies of the Southeast prior to contact with the Europeans? 2) Where were these communities located? 3) How were they transformed into the societies which the Europeans found later in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? The "Black Hole" exists because there was no significant European penetration into the interior of the Southeast from 1568 to 1670; nevertheless, this moment encompasses momentous changes--a time in which a significant component of the human mosaic crumbled and fell to pieces. A continuous documentary record of the region's Indian societies during this period exists only in connection with Spanish Florida, the sphere of the missions. No European observers were present in the Southeastern interior to see and record the catastrophe that obviously occurred. By piecing together archeological information, the picture that emerges is that of a sharp population decline and societal collapse. It was only toward the end of the seventeenth century that the survivors of this decimation began to coalesce into the familiar groups of the old south--Creeks, Catawbas, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees. Questions for Discussion 1. Why is it difficult to know what happened to the native American societies before the seventeenth century? 2. What is the theory of the moundbuilders? 3. How does reading the documents of a scribe help us understand the actions of the explorers? 4. What is ethnocentric about our views of early native Americans? Map Utilization Activity One. Compare the Hudson map above with the contemporary roadmap and determine from these sources the distances marched by the Spanish explorers. Activity Two. At their rate of 17.5 miles each day, how long did it take the Spaniards to march from Point A to Point B (points determined by the teacher)? Note: The names and addresses of the teachers who participated in the 1990 and 1991 seminars at the University of Georgia are available upon request from the author. A record of some of these considerations is forthcoming: Charles M. Hudson and Carmen Tesser (eds.), The Forgotten Centuries: Spanish Explorers and Indian Chiefdoms in the Southeastern United States in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.