Native societies and Spanish empire in the 16th-century American Southeast

Abstract

But from what nation did those ancients derive their origin? How numerous were they? How long did they occupy these regions? When, and by what means, were they exterminated? Would they have lost the well known arts, especially agriculture, pottery and salt making – arts so easy to preserve, and so necessary? And to imagine that the whole people became extinct by pestilence, or some other awful catastrophe, is an extravagant hypothesis, not supported by any precedent in the annals of mankind. M. FISKE (1820: 305, 307)

Eastern North American Population at ca. A.D. 1500

“…Regional structure in the polygon distribution is important because it is consistent with larger areas, as well as individual settlement clusters, having distinct histories of decline ultimately attributable to newly introduced diseases. Two areas characterized by clumped polygons-the Lower Mississippi Valley and southern Appalachians-experienced severe population reductions within a century of the mid-1500s, when Spanish expeditions penetrated deep into the Southeast (Brain 1988; Mainfort 2001;Milanich 1992aMilanich , 1992b; Ramenofsky 1987; Smith 1994Smith , 2000. The spread of new diseases, presumably acute crowd infections including measles and smallpox, would have been facilitated in areas dominated by organizationally complex chiefdoms, which maintained intermittent contact and sometimes formal alliances with their neighbors.…”