The Mississippian shatter zone describes the period from 1540 to 1730 in the southeastern part of the present United States. During that time, the interaction between European explorers and colonists transformed the Native American cultures of that region. In 1540 dozens of chiefdoms and several paramount chiefdoms were scattered throughout the southeast. Chiefdoms featured a noble class ruling a large number of commoners and were characterized by villages and towns with large earthen mounds and complex religious practices. Some chiefdoms, known as paramount chieftains, ruled or influenced large areas. The chiefdoms were ravaged in the mid-16th century by the Spanish exploratory missions of de Soto and others, initiating an irrevocable decline.
The chiefdoms all disappeared by 1730. The most important factor in their gradual disappearance was the chaos induced by slave raids and the enslavement of tens of thousands of Indians. Other factors included epidemics of diseases of European origin and wars among themselves and with European colonists. The trade in slaves was stimulated by the demand of British colonists for slaves and the demand of the Indians for guns and other manufactured products. Some tribes, especially the Westo, specialized in capturing Indians to be enslaved. English and Indian raids on Spanish colonies in Florida and Georgia resulted in a larger number of captured Indians who became slaves. Indian slaves usually ended up working on plantations in the U.S. or were exported to islands in the Caribbean Sea. The city of Charleston, South Carolina was the most important slave market.
The Indian population in the southeast decreased from an estimated 500,000 in 1540 to 90,000 in 1730. The chiefdoms were replaced by simpler coalescent tribes and confederacies made up of survivors and refugees from the fragmented chiefdoms, plus migrants from other areas who fled wars with the English and the Iroquois. These included tribes prominent in 18th and 19th U.S. history such as the Muscogee Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Yuchi, Yamassee, and Catawba.
Prehistory
From 1000 to 1600 CE, the Mississippian culture of the American Indian people flourished in much of what would later become the southern and mid-western United States. The early Mississippian culture (1000 to 1300 CE) featured the rise of Cahokia, located in East St. Louis, Illinois. Cahokia became the largest city north of Mesoamerica covering an area of and with a population estimated at between 10,000 and 15,000 people. The fall of Cahokia about 1300 CE initiated the Middle Mississippian Culture (1300 to 1475 CE) which saw the influence of Cahokia reflected in a large number of smaller chiefdoms. Ethridge, Robbie (2018), "The Rise and Fall of Mississippian Ancient Towns and Cities, 1000-1700", Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Oxford University Press, pages 1-5, Accessed September 8, 2023 The most extensive remains of a chiefdom during this period are found at the Moundville Archaeological Site near Tuscaloosa, Alabama with a population of 1,000 people in the town and 10,000 people nearby in the river valley which it governed."An Archaeological Sketch of Moundville," Moundville Archaeological Museum, . Accessed September 8, 2023 The chiefdoms of this period collapsed about 1450, possibly because of drought, and a new group emerged to characterize the Late Mississippian period from 1475 to 1600, by which time a European presence in the United States had begun to impact the Mississippian peoples. The period between first contact of the traditional chiefdoms with the Europeans in 1540 until the demise of the Mississippian culture in 1730 is called a "shatter zone" by scholars.Ethridge (2018), pp.11-14
The Mississippian people numbered about 500,000 at the time of first contact with Europeans in 1540. They resided in inland areas from the Carolinas west to Arkansas and south from Virginia. They were divided among dozens of chiefdoms. The average chiefdom had a population of 2,800 to 5,400 people of whom 350 to 650 lived in the main town, characterized by large earthen mounds. The mico or chief lived atop the biggest mound and others in the leadership lived atop smaller mounds. The common citizens lived in houses among the mounds. An average chiefdom controlled an area of about along a river. Wars among chiefdoms were common. An unoccupied buffer zone approximately wide separated the lands of one chiefdom from another. The chiefdoms engaged in trade of products such as copper and flintstones. Most of the people were farmers. Their most important crop was maize.Ethridge (2018), pp.2, 4, 11
Many of the chiefdoms were part of one of several "paramount chiefdoms" which controlled or influenced several chiefdoms. The largest paramount chiefdom was perhaps Coosa which encompassed an area long along the Coosa and Tennessee Rivers from Alabama to northern Tennessee and had an estimated population as large as 50,000 people.New Georgia Encyclopedia, "Late Prehistoric Early Historic Chiefdoms,"
Definition Scholar Robbie Ethridge said that the Mississippian shatter zone was characterized by the growth in commercial trade in animal skins and slaves between Indians and Europeans, the encroachments of Europeans, the loss of Indian lives caused by epidemics of European diseases, and increased violence and warfare caused in part by the demand of the Europeans for Indian slaves and the demand of Indians for European products. The consequence was chaos and the destruction of the Mississippian chiefdoms from the time of de Soto until 1730. They were replaced by tribes and confederacies created by the survivors and refugees of Mississippian culture.Ethridge (2018), pp.3, 14
The shatter zone from 1540 to 1730 comprised part of Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Northern Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Arkansas, and part of Louisiana. Most of the chiefdoms were located inland rather than near the coasts of the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico due to the more fertile soils for agriculture in the hinterland as compared to the coasts.
First contacts
Hernando de Soto and 620 Spanish soldiers (along with hundreds of horses, dogs, and pigs) traveled a circuitous route through nine southern states from 1539 to 1542 searching for wealth. They encountered many of the chiefdoms of the Mississippians. Among those chiefdoms de Soto visited were Ocute, Cofitachequi (probably located near Camden, South Carolina), the easternmost chiefdom of the Mississippians; Joara (probably near Morganton, North Carolina) one of the most northern of the chiefdoms; Coosa (located along the Coosawattee River in northwest Georgia; Tuscaluza (near Tuscallusa, Alabama) where de Soto fought the largest battle of his expedition at the town of Mabila; and Tula (probably in Yell County, Arkansas), near the western limits of the Mississippians. De Soto created havoc in this passage, killing and enslaving Indians, confiscating food supplies to feed his soldiers, and possibly spreading European diseases among the people he encountered, although no firm evidence of epidemics among the natives as a result of de Soto's passage has been found.Ethridge (2018), p.14
In 1559–1560, a Spanish expedition headed by Tristán de Luna y Arellano attempted to found a colony on Pensacola Bay, Florida. Knowing that the de Soto expedition had encountered rich towns in the interior, de Luna sent an expedition of 150 men inland to find food for the distressed colony. The expedition reached a town called Nanipacana nine to twelve days walk inland (probably near the present day town of Camden, Alabama). Nanipacana was possibly a successor of the chiefdom of Mabila which Desoto had destroyed 20 years earlier. As the Spanish advanced, the Mississippians abandoned Nanipacana, taking their stored food with them. Still in need of food and looking for a place to establish a viable settlement, the Spanish continued north to the homeland of the Coosa paramount chiefdom. The Spaniards were disappointed in the meager results of their expedition, soon departed Coosa, and abandoned de Luna's colony on Pensacola Bay.Hudson et al (1989), p.40 The Spanish noted that the inhabitants of Nanipacana and Coosa spoke different languages identified by Charles M. Hudson as Choctaw for Nanipacana and Muskogee (Creek) for Coosa.Hudson et al (1989), p.41
In 1566–1568, Juan Pardo led two Spanish expeditions starting in South Carolina, crossing the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina and reaching the French Broad River in Tennessee in the vicinity of what would become the city of Knoxville. He followed roughly the same route as had de Soto through North Carolina, visiting Joara (probably near Morganton, North Carolina). Joara and its vicinity was inhabited by the Cherokee people. In Tennessee the most important chiefdom he visited was called Chiaha, the northernmost outpost of the territory dominated by the Coosa paramount chiefdom. The location of Chiaha was on Zimmerman Island, now submerged beneath the waters behind Douglas Dam. The Chiaha were speakers of a Muskogee language, which was probably true of most or all of the peoples dominated by Coosa. Pardo established six forts along his route staffed by 120 men, but the Indians soon killed them all and burned the forts.
The failure of the de Soto, de Luna, and Pardo expeditions to find any source of readily available wealth led to the Spanish abandoning their attempts to settle among and control the Mississippians. St. Augustine (founded 1565) in Florida became the center of the much-reduced Spanish activity in the inland areas of the southeastern United States. After the three Spanish expeditions, little is known of the Mississippians for the next hundred years.
Disappearance of the chiefdoms
The Coosa paramount chiefdom fragmented before 1600, with only a remnant of the original chiefdom remaining in northern Alabama.Ethridge, Robbie (2009), "Introduction" in Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, p.9New Georgia Encyclopedia In the 1620s people of the Chiscas chiefdom from northeastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia migrated, for unknown reasons, hundreds of miles south to northern Florida.Worth, John E. (2009), Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone Chapter 11, edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, page 297-298. Downloaded from Project Muse. The Powhatan confederacy in Virginia ceased to exist about 1650 due to wars with the English colonists.Ethridge (2009), p.38 Cofitachequi continued to exercise control over a large area of South Carolina until at least 1672.DePratter, Chester B. "Cofitachqui: Ethnohistorical and Archaeological Evidence" University of South Carolina Scholar Commons, pp. 133–139; , accessed 14 Oct 2013 The chroniclers of DeSoto agreed that the largest and most impressive of the chiefdoms were near the Mississippi River in Tennessee, Mississippi, and Arkansas. These chiefdoms began to disappear by about 1650 and were largely gone when the next foreign visitors, the French, visited the area in 1673. The last surviving Mississippian chiefdom, the Natchez, was defeated in a war with the French in 1731."Native Americans," Encyclopedia of Arkansas,Ethridge, Robbie (2013), From Chicaza to Chickasaw, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 123. Downloaded from Project Muse.Ethridge (2009), p. 38
Slavery
Historian Alan Gallay said that the "trade in Indian slaves was the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670 to 1715: its impact was felt from Arkansas to the Carolinas and south to the Florida Keys."Gallay, Alan (2012), The Indian Slave Trade, New Haven: Yale University Press, ISBN 0300101937, p. 7