Conquistador's Wake by Dennis B. Blanton

Author:Dennis B. Blanton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780820356365
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2020-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

7.1. Locations of Native provinces along Soto’s route (after Hudson 1997)

Whatever its origin, an immigrant Lamar population chose to situate itself on the lower part of the Ocmulgee River a few generations before its existence was disrupted by Europeans. Frankie Snow had begun to detect evidence of these events, and our Fernbank-sponsored research has verified them. Whereas two decades and more earlier archaeologists dismissed the area as a vacant sector, they must now acknowledge the existence of another Lamar polity in Georgian space. The absence of ancestral settlements and large mounds in our project area speak to the brevity of its existence, but even in nascent form, it was present and probably enjoying reasonable prosperity into the early sixteenth century.

Importantly, the Glass Site bears all the hallmarks of a provincial capital, as we shall see. But looking more widely, the other Lamar sites we tested as part of the mission search, together with others identified by Frankie’s surveys, serve to define the extent of the province (figure 7.2). They are plotted on both sides of the river within a 700 km2 (270 mi2) area, extending from near The Forks to Jacksonville. This falls well within earlier determinations of the average, 1500 km2 territory for Lamar provinces, and it also indicates that an ample buffer stood between it and the nearest rival territory.

The majority of the sites within this space are far smaller in size than the Glass Site. This we know best from Frankie’s notes but also from some of our testing operations. They lack evidence for more than one or two structures, and only on rare occasion do they include middens indicative of lengthy or intensive occupation. All these characteristics meet expectations for family-sized farmsteads where, considered holistically, most of a local population resided and generated food to support a small elite. This arrangement is precisely what has been documented in the Piedmont provinces and throughout the Mississippian sphere.3 Presently we know of many potential farmsteads relatively close to the Glass Site that merit exploration.

One or two settlements within the Big Bend province, other than the Glass Site, might also have risen, at different times, to capital status. They approach the same size, and they include relatively well-developed middens within which artifact density is high. This is a sign that the new province, short-lived as it was, had begun to accumulate its own history and to experience the same old challenges that demanded occasional spells of reconfiguration. To the extent we can judge the chain of events from available evidence, Glass was neither the first nor the final territorial capital. Ceramic analysis results point to Coffee Bluff as the earliest of them. Yet another of the local Lamar sites yields pottery made slightly differently, and it is also where a very late type of glass bead and a piece of metal were found on the surface.4 That site, in fact, emerges as the best candidate for the seventeenth-century mission that was the beginning thrust of the project.

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