An early Spanish explorer’s account of American Indians.

 

This volume mines the Pardo documents to reveal a wealth of information pertaining to Pardo’s routes, his encounters and interactions with native peoples, the social, hierarchical, and political structures of the Indians, and clues to the ethnic identities of Indians known previously only through archaeology. The new afterword reveals recent archaeological evidence of Pardo’s Fort San Juan--the earliest site of sustained interaction between Europeans and Indians--demonstrating the accuracy of Hudson’s route reconstructions.

 

Charles Hudson is Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History Emeritus at the University of Georgia and author of Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun:  Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms. Paul E. Hoffman is Paul W. and Nancy W. Murrill Professor of History at Louisiana State University and author of Florida's Frontiers. David G. Moore teaches archaeology at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina, and is the author of Catawba Valley Mississippian: Ceramics, Chronology, and Catawba Indians. Robin A. Beck Jr. is currently Visiting Scholar at the Center for Archaeological Investigations, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Christopher B. Rodning is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma and the coeditor of Archaeological Studies of Gender in the Southeastern United States.

"This work will be especially welcomed by those seeking connections between archaeological 'phases' with unlikely names and historic Indian tribes of the Southeast. This is a bold interpretation based upon several rather thin lines of evidence. Its strength lies in the confidence one can place in Hoffman's translations and in the solid reputation Hudson has built reinterpreting the Southeast before as well as after Pardo's time."

—American Indian Quarterly