The New South: The Fall of the Pre-contact Mississippian World and the Emergence of a New Social Geography in the American South, 1540–1730

Over the past twenty years, archaeologists and ethnohistorians studying the southeastern Indians have reconstructed much about Native life before European contact and much about life in the South during the eighteenth-century.  This research has made one thing clear--the Indians of the sixteenth-century south were quite different from the Indians of the eighteenth-century south.  Scholars now understand that this was a time of a profound social transformation among the Native people of the Southeastern United States.  The people who stood on either side of this great transformational divide were organized into quite different kinds of societies.  The Indians of the eighteenth-century South are the ones with which most people are familiar and whose descendants are recognized today--the Creek, the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Catawba, and so on.  We now know that these societies formed out of the chiefdoms of the pre-contact Mississippian world such as Coosa, Mabila, Pacaha, Chicaza, Cofitachequi, and others as they broke apart in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  We still do not have an adequate vocabulary to describe the societies of the eighteenth century.  They have been called "confederacies," "tribes," "nations," and so on.  We now generally call them "coalescent societies” because they were all, in varying degrees, coalescences of people from different societies, cultures, and languages as people from fallen chiefdoms relocated and banded together with others.   This paper examines how Native peoples built a new social geography out of  the fall of their Mississippian world and sketches the ecological, economic, and political contours of this early eighteenth-century  "new South."