Hernando de Soto, the Spanish conquistador, is legendary in the United States today: counties, cars, caverns, shopping malls and bridges all bear his name. This work explains the historical importance of his expedition, a journey that began at Tampa Bay in 1539 and ended in Arkansas in 1543. De Soto's explorations, the first European penetration of eastern North America, preceded a demographic disaster for the aboriginal peoples in the region. Old World diseases, perhaps introduced by the de Soto expedition and certainly by other Europeans in the 16th and 17th centuries, killed many thousands of Indians. By the middle of the 18th century only a few remained alive. The de Soto narratives provide the first European account of many of these Indian societies as they were at the time of European contact. This work interprets these and other 16th-century accounts in the light of new archaeological information, resulting in a more comprehensive view of the native peoples. Matching de Soto's camps to sites where artifacts from the de Soto era have been found, the authors reconstruct his route in Florida and at the same time clarify questions about the social geography and political relationships of the Florida Indians. They link names once known only from documents (for example, the Uzita, who occupied territory at the de Soto landing site, and the Aguacaleyquen of north peninsular Florida) to actual archaeological remains and sites.

With essays by Stephen Davis, Penelope Drooker, Patricia K. Galloway, Steven Hahn, Charles Hudson, Marvin Jeter, Paul Kelton, Timothy Pertulla, Christopher Rodning, Helen Rountree, Marvin T. Smith, and John Worth

The first two-hundred years of Western civilization in the Americas was a time when fundamental and sometimes catastrophic changes occurred in Native American communities in the South.

In "The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians," historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists provide perspectives on how this era shaped American Indian society for later generations and how it even affects these communities today.

This collection of essays presents the most current scholarship on the social history of the South, identifying and examining the historical forces, trends, and events that were attendant to the formation of the Indians of the colonial South.

The essayists discuss how Southeastern Indian culture and society evolved. They focus on such aspects as the introduction of European diseases to the New World, long-distance migration and relocation, the influences of the Spanish mission system, the effects of the English plantation system, the northern fur trade of the English, and the French, Dutch, and English trade of Indian slaves and deerskins in the South.

This book covers the full geographic and social scope of the Southeast, including the indigenous peoples of Florida, Virginia, Maryland, the Appalachian Mountains, the Carolina Piedmont, the Ohio Valley, and the Central and Lower Mississippi Valleys.

Robbie Ethridge is an assistant professor of anthropology and southern studies at the University of Mississippi. Charles Hudson is Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Georgia.