The Apalachee were an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, specifically an Indigenous people of Florida, who lived in the Florida Panhandle until the early 18th century.Bobby G. McEwan, "Apalachee and Neighboring Groups," p. 676. They lived between the Aucilla River and Ochlockonee River,Bobby G. McEwan, "Apalachee and Neighboring Groups," 669. at the head of Apalachee Bay, an area known as the Apalachee Province. They spoke a Muskogean language called Apalachee, which is now extinct.
The Apalachee occupied the site of Velda Mound starting about 1450 CE, but they had mostly abandoned it when Spanish started settlements in the 17th century. They first encountered Spanish explorers in 1528, when the Narváez expedition arrived. Their tribal enemies, European diseases, and European encroachment severely reduced their population.
Warfare from 1701 to 1704 devastated the Apalachee, and they abandoned their homelands by 1704, fleeing north to the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama.Bobby G. McEwan, "Apalachee and Neighboring Groups," p. 673
Language The Apalachee language was a Muskogean language, about which little more is known. It went extinct in the late 18th century. The only surviving Apalachee document is a 1688 letter written by Apalachee chiefs to the Spanish king. However, it has been partially reconstructed through Spanish mission records and comparative linguistics. It featured a distinct vowel and consonant inventory, which scholars have documented based on 17th-century orthographic conventions. These reconstructions help linguists understand how the Apalachee may have sounded, despite the language now being extinct.
Name Ethnographer John Reed Swanton wrote that Apalachee may have come from the Hitchiti language term for "people on the other side" or the Choctaw language word apelachi meaning "a helper." It has sometimes been spelled Abalache, Abalachi, or Abolachi.
Culture
The Apalachee are thought to be part of Fort Walton Culture, a Florida culture influenced by the Mississippian culture.
The Apalachee were horticulturalists with stratified chiefdoms and sedentary towns and villages. Like many other Southeastern tribes, they have an alternating dual governmental system with a war chief and a peace chief. Leadership was hereditary and matrilinear.Bobby G. McEwan, "Apalachee and Neighboring Groups," p. 670. The Apalachee operated under a centralized political structure led by hereditary chiefs, with each town maintaining its own council and ceremonial center. Their society was matrilineal, and leaders often inherited power through the maternal line.Hann, J. H. (1988). Apalachee: The Land Between the Rivers. University Presses of Florida. pp. 24–29. Religious life revolved around large temple mounds, where elites conducted rituals tied to agriculture, warfare, and celestial events.Hann, J. H. (1988). Apalachee: The Land Between the Rivers. pp. 46–54.
At the time of Hernando de Soto's visit in 1539 and 1540, the Apalachee capital was Anhaica (present-day Tallahassee, Florida). The Apalachee lived in villages of various sizes, or on individual farmsteads of or so. Smaller settlements might have a single earthwork mound and a few houses. Larger towns (50 to 100 houses) were chiefdoms. They were organized around earthwork mounds built over decades for ceremonial, religious and burial purposes.
Villages and towns were often situated by lakes, as the Native people hunted fish and used the water for domestic needs and transport. The largest Apalachee community was at Lake Jackson, just north of present-day Tallahassee. This regional center had several mounds and 200 or more houses. Some of the surviving mounds are protected in Lake Jackson Mounds Archaeological State Park.
The Apalachee cultivated maize, beans, and squash, as well as amaranth and sunflowers.Bobby G. McEwan, "Apalachee and Neighboring Groups," p. 671. They also harvested wild plants including persimmons, maypops, acorns, walnuts, hickory nuts, sassafras, yaupon holly, cabbage palm (Sabal palmetto), and saw palmetto (Serenoa). They hunted deer, black bears, rabbits, opossums, squirrels, geese, wild turkeys, and mountain lions.
The Apalachee were part of an expansive trade network that extended from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes, and westward to what is now Oklahoma. The Apalachee acquired copper artifacts, sheets of mica, greenstone, and galena from distant locations through this trade. The Apalachee probably paid for such imports with shells, pearls, shark teeth, preserved fish and sea turtle meat, salt, and cassina leaves and twigs (used to make the black drink).
The Apalachee made tools from stone, bone and shell. They made pottery, wove cloth and cured buckskin. They built houses covered with palm leaves or the bark of cypress or poplar trees. They stored food in pits in the ground lined with matting, and smoked or dried food on racks over fires. (When Hernando de Soto seized the Apalachee town of Anhaico in 1539, he found enough stored food to feed his 600 men and 220 horses for five months.)
The Apalachee men wore a deerskin loincloth. The women wore a skirt made of Spanish moss or other plant fibers. The men painted their bodies with red ochre and placed feathers in their hair when they prepared for battle. The men smoked tobacco in ceremonial rituals, including ones for healing.
The Apalachee scalped opponents whom they killed, exhibiting the scalps as signs of warrior ability. Taking a scalp was a means of entering the warrior class, and was celebrated with a scalp dance. The warriors wore headdresses made of bird beaks and animal fur. The village or clan of a slain warrior was expected to avenge his death.
Ball game The Apalachee played a ball game, sometimes known as the "Apalachee ball game", described in detail by Spaniards in the 17th century. The fullest description,Available in English translation at http://earlyfloridalit.net/?page_id=59, retrieved 6/5/2015. however, was written as part of a campaign by Father Juan de Paiva, a priest at the mission of San Luis de Talimali, to have the game banned, and some of the practices described may have been exaggerated. The game was embedded in ritual practices that Father Paiva regarded as heathen superstitions. He was also concerned about the effect of community involvement in the games on the welfare of the villages and Spanish missions. In particular, he worried about towns being left defenseless against raiders when inhabitants left for a game, and that fieldwork was being neglected during game season. Other missionaries (and the visiting Bishop of Cuba) had complained about the game, but most of the Spanish (including, initially, Father Pavia) liked it (and, most likely, the associated gambling). At least, they defended it as a custom that should not be disturbed, and that helped keep the Apalachee happy and willing to work in the fields. The Apalachee themselves said that the game was "as ancient as memory", and that they had "no other entertainment ... or relief from ... misery".Bushnell, "That Demonic Game," 5, 6–15.
No indigenous name for the game has been preserved. The Spanish referred to it as el juego de la pelota, "the ballgame." The game involved kicking a small, hard ball against a single goalpost. The same game was also played by the western Timucua, and was as significant among them as it was among the Apalachee.Hann, John H. (1996) A History of the Timucua Indians and Missions, pp. 107–111. University Press of Florida. . A related but distinct game was played by the eastern Timucua; René Goulaine de Laudonnière recorded seeing this played by the Saturiwa of what is now Jacksonville, Florida in 1564. Goalposts similar to those used by the Apalachee were also seen in the Coosa chiefdom of present-day in Alabama during the 16th century, suggesting that similar ball games were played across much of the region.Bushnell, "That Demonic Game," 5
A village would challenge another village to a game, and the two villages would then negotiate a day and place for the match. After the Spanish missions were established, the games usually took place on a Sunday afternoon, from about noon until dark. The two teams kicked a small ball (not much bigger than a musket ball), made by wrapping buckskin around dried mud, trying to hit the goalpost. The single goalpost was triangular, flat, and taller than it was wide, on a long post (Bushnell described it, based on a drawing in a Spanish manuscript, as "like a tall, flat Christmas tree with a long trunk"). There were snail shells, a nest and a stuffed eagle on top of the goalpost. Benches, and sometimes arbors to shade them, were placed at the edges of the field for the two teams. Spectators gambled heavily on the games. As the Apalachee did not normally use money, their bets were made with personal goods.Bushnell, "That Demonic Game," 5–6.
Each team consisted of 40 to 50 men. The best players were highly prized, and villages gave them houses, planted their fields for them, and overlooked their misdeeds in an effort to keep such players on their teams. Players scored one point if they hit the goalpost with the ball, and two points if the ball landed in the nest. Eleven points won the game. Play was rough. They would try to hide the ball in their mouths; other players would choke them or kick them in the stomach to force the ball out. There were occasional deaths. According to Father Paiva, five games in a row had ended in riots.Bushnell, "That Demonic Game," 6–7, 9, 13, 15.
The game's origin story was elaborate. Challenging a team to a game, erecting goalposts and players' benches, and other aspects were governed by strict ceremonial protocols. Christian elements became part of the game. Players began asking priests to make the sign of the cross over pileups during a game.Bushnell, "That Demonic Game," 10–15.
History The densely populated Apalachee had a complex, highly stratified society of regional chiefdoms."Apalachee Province" , History and Archeology, Friends of Mission San Luis, 2008, accessed 1 Feb 2010 They were one of the Mississippian cultures and part of an expansive trade network reaching to the Great Lakes. Their reputation was such that when tribes in southern Florida first encountered the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition, they said the riches which the Spanish sought could be found in Apalachee country.
The "Appalachian" place name is derived from the Narváez Expedition's encounter in 1528 with the Tocobaga, who spoke of a country named Apalachen far to the north.Schneider, pp102-103 Several weeks later the expedition entered the territory of Apalachee north of the Aucilla River. Eleven years later the Hernando de Soto expedition reached the main Apalachee town of Anhaica, somewhere in the area of present-day Tallahassee, Florida, probably near Lake Miccosukee. The Spanish subsequently adapted the Native American name as Apalachee and applied it to the coastal region bordering Apalachee Bay, as well as to the tribe which lived in it. Narváez's expedition first entered Apalachee territory on June 15, 1528. "Appalachian" is the fourth-oldest surviving European place name in the United States.
Archaeological evidence shows that the Apalachee region was home to earlier indigenous cultures such as Norwood, Swift Creek, Weeden Island, and Fort Walton, each contributing to the region's ceramic styles, burial traditions, and social organization.Wisenbaker, M. S. (1998). Aboriginal Settlement in the Apalachee Region of Florida. Florida Bureau of Archaeological Research. These cultures laid the groundwork for later Mississippian-influenced Apalachee society, especially in terms of mound-building and complex settlement systems.
Spanish encounters