Cofitachequi was a paramount chiefdom founded about AD 1300 and encountered by the Hernando de Soto expedition in South Carolina in April 1540. Cofitachequi was later visited by Juan Pardo during his two expeditions (1566–1568) and by Henry Woodward in 1670. Cofitachequi ceased to exist as a political entity before 1701.
The hunt for the location of Cofitachequi has been stimulated by the century-old search for the route of Hernando de Soto in his 4-year traverse of much of the southeastern United States. The Spaniards described Cofitachequi as about 10 days of travel eastward from Ocute through an uninhabited wilderness. Cofitachequi was situated on a large river about 100 miles from the coast. Several other towns were nearby, including Talimeco, said to be about 3 miles distant and situated on a bluff overlooking "the gorge of the river." The description of Talimeco indicates that Cofitachequi was near the Atlantic Seaboard fall line where Atlantic coast rivers drop sharply from the hilly piedmont area to the flatlands extending inland from the coast. Another town, called Ilapi or Ilasi, was located on a second river to the east. Cofitachequi was a large town in addition to being a ceremonial center. The size of Cofitachequi is indicated by the fact that de Soto during his occupation took over about one-half the houses in the town to house his 600 men (and, in addition, to house probably several hundred retainers and slaves). Thus, archaeological ruins of Cofitachequi should be extensive. [1]
Cofitachequi may have come to the attention of the Spanish as early as 1521 when two Spanish ships explored the South Carolina coast. At present day Winyah Bay, near the city of Georgetown, they captured and enslaved about sixty people who said they were subjects of a ruler called Datha or Duhare. Datha may have been the ruler of Cofitachequi, some 90 miles inland from Georgetown. One of the captives, called Francisco Chicora, learned Spanish and visited Spain. He described Datha to Peter Martyr as "white", tall, carried on the shoulders of his subjects, and ruling a large region of towns featuring earthen mounds upon which religious ceremonies were held. Large quantities of pearls and jewels, Chicora said, could be found at Xapira, a town or chiefdom near Datha. [2]
In 1526, inspired by these stories, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón led 600 people to establish a colony that would exploit the supposed riches of Datha. At Winyah Bay, one of his ships was wrecked and Chicora and others escaped from the Spanish. Ayllon established a settlement near Sapelo Sound in present day Georgia, but he died and the colony was abandoned after three months, the 150 survivors returning to the Caribbean. [3] Ayllón's colony was probably the source of items of European manufacture later discovered by De Soto in Cofitachequi. [4]
While de Soto was among the Apalachee people in Florida, a captured boy called Perico told him of a province named "Yupaha" ruled by a woman and rich in gold. De Soto decided to strike out for Yupaha—which turned out to be an alternative name of Cofitachequi. In the Spring of 1540, de Soto and his army traveled north through central Georgia to the Oconee River town of Cofaqui in present day Greene County, Georgia, in the chiefdom of Ocute. The people of Calfaqui were aware of Cofitachequi but did not know its exact location. De Soto impressed 700 people from Colfaqui and struck off eastward into a large uninhabited wilderness separating the chiefdoms of Ocute and Cofitachequi. He reached Cofitachequi only after two weeks. [6]
De Soto was met by a woman the chroniclers call the Lady of Cofitachequi who was carried from the town to the river's edge on a litter that was covered with a delicate white cloth. They considered her the leader of the villages. [7] Indeed, she ruled over thousands of subjects as a "paramount chief." [8] After spending several weeks in the village, the Spaniards took the "Lady" as a captive and hostage and headed to the next chiefdom to the northwest, Joara. She eventually escaped. The Spaniards found no gold in Cofitachequi, nor anywhere in its vicinity. [9]
Juan Pardo with a force of 125 Spaniards visited Cofitachequi (which he also called Canosi) on two expeditions between 1566 and 1568. Juan de Torres led 10 Spanish soldiers and 60 native allies to Cofitachequi on two expeditions in 1627–1628. He was "well entertained by the chief who is highly respected by the rest of the chiefs, who all obey him and acknowledge vassalage to him." In 1670, an Englishman, Henry Woodward, journeyed inland from Charlestown, South Carolina to Cofitachequi. He called the chief "the emperor" and said the town counted 1,000 bowmen. The "emperor" of Cofitachequi visited Charleston in 1670 and 1672. Sometime after that, Cofitachequi was abandoned. By 1701, when John Lawson passed through, the area of Cofitachequi was inhabited only by small settlements of the Congaree. [10]
Cofitachequi was typical of several Mississippian paramount chiefdoms in the American south at the time of de Soto: a town at the center of the chiefdom, often containing ceremonial mounds and temples and controlling a large number of smaller settlements with the influence of the center extending out many miles. The chiefdoms were often bordered by an uninhabited area as a buffer zone between warring chiefdoms. The basis of the economy was maize agriculture. Cofitachequi was perhaps the easternmost of the Mississippian chiefdoms and one of the latest, founded after 1300 A.D. [11]
There were three levels of political power at Cofitachequi. The orata was a lesser noble, seemingly in charge of a village or a few villages. The mico was a great noble who occupied one of the administrative centers of the chiefdom, presumably complete with a mound. Above these was the gran cacique, the great chief or paramount chief . Lesser officials were ynihas, or ynanaes, who were chiefs' assistants, perhaps comparable to magistrates. The yatikas were interpreters and spokesmen. The culture of Cofitachequi was a variant of the Lamar culture that was broadly comparable to that of the people of Ocute in Georgia. [12]
The people of Cofitachequi are often described as Muskogean speakers, but that is not certain. The area of influence of Cofitachequi probably included Siouan and Iroquoian (Cherokee) speakers. Linguist Blair A. Rudes analyzed sixteenth-century placenames from Cofitachique/Canos to Xualla. Rudes used the term Cofitachique in a broad sense to include all the towns that are supposed to have been part of the Cofitacheque chiefdom, or that were allies. He shows that previous attempts to use recorded placenames to identify the sixteenth-century inhabitants with eighteenth-century tribes have been flawed:
"Previous research on the etymology of place names from Cofitchequi might best be characterized as long on speculation and short on rigor. While etymologies have been proposed for many of the place names, few stand up to careful review. Unfortunately, the weaknesses in prior analyses have not prevented researchers from using the results to draw sweeping conclusions about the ethnic and linguistic composition of the area. Rudes goes on to suggest that while Booker, Hudson, and Rankin follow John Swanton's proposal that “Muskogean-speaking people were a major constituent of the population”, a careful analysis of the evidence does not support that conclusion." Though Hudson et al. put forward several place names in the Cofitachequi orbit as Muskogean, Rudes finds only one to be of Muskogean origin, that of Talimeco/Talomeco. But this name, he argues, is likely not an indigenous place name, but a descriptive name given by a Muskogean speaking interpreter. The name simply means a town wherein a chief resides or chiefs’ town. Therefore, of all the sixteenth-century placenames recorded for towns from Cofitachequi to Guasili, Rudes concludes that none, based on linguistic evidence, appear to have been Muskogean towns. [13]
Some scholars speculate that Cofitachequi politically controlled a cluster of towns around present-day Camden, an 80 to 100 mile (130–160 km) stretch of the Wateree River and vicinity in South Carolina, and a similar portion of the Pee Dee River. More distant towns in the piedmont of North Carolina and the coastal plains of South Carolina may have paid tribute to Cofitachequi, but retained a measure of freedom. The scholar Charles Hudson listed more than 30 towns that might have been under the control of Cofitachequi, indicating a population of the chiefdom of several tens of thousands of people. [14]
The chiefdom of Cofitachequi may have been in decline when visited by de Soto in 1540 and Pardo in 1566, much of the decline occasioned by the brutal passage of de Soto and his army. De Soto found little maize in the town to feed his soldiers and saw evidence that an epidemic, possibly European in origin, had wiped out the population of several settlements. Nevertheless, the fame and some of the influence of Cofitachequi endured another 100 years until the time of Woodward's visit. Why Cofitachequi disappeared, replaced by smaller communities, is unknown although the ravages of European diseases were probably a factor. The surviving Muskogean speaking inhabitants of Cofitachequi were likely absorbed by the Siouan people inhabiting the area in 1701 when Lawson visited. [15]
Hernando de Soto was a Spanish explorer and conquistador who was involved in expeditions in Nicaragua and the Yucatan Peninsula. He played an important role in Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire in Peru, but is best known for leading the first European expedition deep into the territory of the modern-day United States. He is the first European documented as having crossed the Mississippi River.
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. They lived between the Aucilla River and Ochlockonee River, at the head of Apalachee Bay, an area known as the Apalachee Province. They spoke a Muskogean language called Apalachee, which is now extinct.
Joara was a large Native American settlement, a regional chiefdom of the Mississippian culture, located in what is now Burke County, North Carolina, about 300 miles from the Atlantic coast in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Joara is notable as a significant archaeological and historic site, where Mississippian culture-era and European artifacts have been found, in addition to an earthwork platform mound and remains of a 16th-century Spanish fort.
Tuskaloosa was a paramount chief of a Mississippian chiefdom in what is now the U.S. state of Alabama. His people were possibly ancestors to the several southern Native American confederacies who later emerged in the region. The modern city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, is named for him.
The Yamasees were a multiethnic confederation of Native Americans who lived in the coastal region of present-day northern coastal Georgia near the Savannah River and later in northeastern Florida. The Yamasees engaged in revolts and wars with other native groups and Europeans living in North America, specifically from Florida to North Carolina.
The Coosa chiefdom was a powerful Native American paramount chiefdom in what are now Gordon and Murray counties in Georgia, in the United States. It was inhabited from about 1400 until about 1600, and dominated several smaller chiefdoms. The total population of Coosa's area of influence, reaching into present-day Tennessee and Alabama, has been estimated at 50,000.
The Chisca were a tribe of Native Americans living in present-day eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia in the 16th century. Their descendants, the Yuchi lived in present-day Alabama, Georgia, and Florida in the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries, and were removed to Indian Territory in the 1830s.
Santa Elena, a Spanish settlement on what is now Parris Island, South Carolina, was the capital of Spanish Florida from 1566 to 1587. It was established under Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the first governor of Spanish Florida. There had been a number of earlier attempts to establish colonies in the area by both the Spanish and the French, who had been inspired by the earlier accounts by Chicora and Hernando de Soto of rich territories in the interior. Menéndez's Santa Elena settlement was intended as the new capital of the Spanish colony of La Florida, shifting the focus of Spanish colonial efforts north from St. Augustine, which had been established in 1565 to oust the French from their colony of Fort Caroline. Santa Elena was ultimately built at the site of the abandoned French outpost of Charlesfort, founded in 1562 by Jean Ribault.
The Cusabo were a group of American Indian tribes who lived along the coast of the Atlantic Ocean in what is now South Carolina, approximately between present-day Charleston and south to the Savannah River, at the time of European colonization. English colonists often referred to them as one of the Settlement Indians of South Carolina, tribes who "settled" among the colonists.
Charles Melvin Hudson Jr. (1932–2013) was an anthropologist, a professor of anthropology and history at the University of Georgia. He was a leading scholar on the history and culture of Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the present-day United States. He is known for his book mapping the expedition of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto in the mid-16th century in the Southeast, based on both the expedition's records and sites identified through archeology and anthropology.
Toqua was a prehistoric and historic Native American site in Monroe County, Tennessee, located in the Southeastern Woodlands. Toqua was the site of a substantial ancestral town that thrived during the Mississippian period. Toqua had a large earthwork 25-foot (7.6 m) platform mound built by the town's Mississippian-era inhabitants, in addition to a second, smaller mound. The site's Mississippian occupation may have been recorded by the Spanish as the village of Tali, which was documented in 1540 by the Hernando de Soto expedition. It was later known as the Overhill Cherokee town Toqua, and this name was applied to the archeological site.
Chiaha was a Native American chiefdom located in the lower French Broad River valley in modern East Tennessee, in the southeastern United States. They lived in raised structures within boundaries of several stable villages. These overlooked the fields of maize, beans, squash, and tobacco, among other plants which they cultivated. Chiaha was at the northern extreme of the paramount Coosa chiefdom's sphere of influence in the 16th century when the Spanish expeditions of Hernando de Soto and Juan Pardo passed through the area. The Chiaha chiefdom included parts of modern Jefferson and Sevier counties, and may have extended westward into Knox, Blount and Monroe counties.
Francisco de Chicora was the baptismal name given to a Native American kidnapped in 1521, along with 70 others, from near Winyah Bay by Spanish explorer Francisco Gordillo and slave trader Pedro de Quexos, based in Santo Domingo and the first Europeans to reach the area. From analysis of the account by Peter Martyr, court chronicler, the ethnographer John R. Swanton believed that Chicora was from a Catawban group.
Bussell Island, formerly Lenoir Island, is an island located at the mouth of the Little Tennessee River, at its confluence with the Tennessee River in Loudon County, near the U.S. city of Lenoir City, Tennessee. The island was inhabited by various Native American cultures for thousands of years before the arrival of early European explorers. The Tellico Dam and a recreational area occupy part of the island. Part of the island was added in 1978 to the National Register of Historic Places for its archaeological potential.
The Lamar mounds and village site (9BI2) is an important archaeological site on the banks of the Ocmulgee River in Bibb County, Georgia, several miles to the southeast of the Ocmulgee mound site. Both mound sites are part of the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, a national park and historic district created in 1936 and run by the U.S. National Park Service. Historians and archaeologists have theorized that the site is the location of the main village of the Ichisi encountered by the Hernando de Soto expedition in 1539.
Ocute, later known as Altamaha or La Tama and sometimes known conventionally as the Oconee province, was a Native American paramount chiefdom in the Piedmont region of the U.S. state of Georgia in the 16th and 17th centuries. Centered in the Oconee River valley, the main chiefdom of Ocute held sway over the nearby chiefdoms of Altamaha, Cofaqui, and possibly others.
Quigualtam or Quilgualtanqui was a powerful Native American Plaquemine culture polity encountered in 1542–1543 by the Hernando de Soto expedition. The capital of the polity and its chieftain also bore the same name; although neither the chief nor his settlements were ever visited in person by the expedition. Their encounters consisted of messages sent by runners and a three-day long canoe battle on the Mississippi River. Multiple archaeological cultures, archaeological sites, and protohistoric and early historic period Native American groups have been proposed by historians and archaeologists to identify the polity, but their identity will probably never be known with any degree of certainty. The chroniclers of the DeSoto expedition said the chiefdoms near the Mississippi River, especially Guigualtam, were the best they encountered during their three-year journey through the southeastern United States.
Juan Ortiz was a Spanish sailor who was held captive and enslaved by Native Americans in Florida for eleven years, from 1528 until he was rescued by the Hernando de Soto expedition in 1539. Two accounts of Ortiz's eleven years as a captive, differing in details, offer a story of Ortiz being sentenced to death by a Native American chief two or three times, saved each time by the intervention of a daughter of the chief, and finally escaping to a neighboring chiefdom, whose chief sheltered him.
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 by the de Soto and other Spanish exploratory missions in the 1540s through the 1560s and their decline began.
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| South Appalachian Mississippian |
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| Caddoan Mississippian | |||||||||||
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