Contact with Europeans Mississippian culture

a map showing de soto route through southeast

scholars have studied records of hernando de soto s expedition of 1539–1543 learn of contacts mississippians, traveled through villages of southeast. visited many villages, in cases staying month or longer. list of sites , peoples visited hernando de soto expedition chronicles villages. encounters violent, while others relatively peaceable. in cases, de soto seems have been used tool or ally in long-standing native feuds. in 1 example, de soto negotiated truce between pacaha , casqui.

de soto s later encounters left half of spaniards , perhaps many hundreds of native americans dead. chronicles of de soto among first documents written mississippian peoples, , invaluable source of information on cultural practices. chronicles of narváez expedition written before de soto expedition; narváez expedition informed court of de soto new world.

after destruction , flight of de soto expedition, mississippian peoples continued way of life little direct european influence. indirectly, however, european introductions dramatically changed native societies in eastern united states. because natives lacked immunity new infectious diseases, such measles , smallpox, epidemics caused many fatalities undermined social order of many chiefdoms. groups adopted european horses , changed nomadism. political structures collapsed in many places.

at joara, near morganton, north carolina, native americans of mississippian culture interacted spanish colonizers of juan pardo expedition, built base there in 1567 called fort san juan. expedition documentation , archaeological evidence of fort , native american culture both exist. soldiers @ fort 18 months (1567–1568) before natives killed them , destroyed fort. (they killed soldiers stationed @ 5 other forts well; 1 man of 120 survived.) sixteenth-century spanish artifacts have been recovered site, marking first european colonization in interior of became united states.

by time more documentary accounts being written, mississippian way of life had changed irrevocably. groups maintained oral tradition link mound-building past, such late 19th-century cherokee. other native american groups, having migrated many hundreds of miles , lost elders diseases, did not know ancestors had built mounds dotting landscape. contributed myth of mound builders people distinct native americans, rigorously debunked cyrus thomas in 1894.