Charles M. Hudson – författare

This book begins where the reach of archaeology and history ends, writes Charles Hudson. Grounded in careful research, his extraordinary work imaginatively brings to life the sixteenth-century world of the Coosa, a native people whose territory stretched across the Southeast, encompassing much of presentday Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama. Cast as a series of conversations between Domingo de la Anunciacion, a real-life Spanish priest who traveled to the Coosa chiefdom around 1559, and the Raven, a fictional tribal elder, Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa attempts to reconstruct the worldview of the Indians of the late prehistoric Southeast. Mediating the exchange between the two men is Teresa, a character modeled on a Coosa woman captured some twenty years earlier by the Hernando de Soto expedition and taken to Mexico, where she learned Spanish and became a Christian convert. Through story and legend, the Raven teaches Anunciacion about the rituals, traditions, and culture of the Coosa. He tells of how the Coosa world came to be and recounts tales of the birds and animals - real and mythical - that share that world. From these engaging conversations emerges a fascinating glimpse inside the Coosa belief system and an enhanced understanding of the native people who inhabited the ancient South.

The Forgotten Centuries draws together seventeen essays in which historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists attempt for the first time to account for approximately two centuries that are virtually missing from the history of a large portion of the American South.Using the chronicles of the Spanish soldiers and adventurers, the contributors survey the emergence and character of the chiefdoms of the Southeast. In addition, they offer new scholarly interpretations of the expeditions of Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon from 1521 to 1526, Panfilo de Narvaez in 1528, and most particularly Hernando de Soto in 1539-43, as well as several expeditions conducted between 1597 and 1628.The essays in this volume address three other connected topics. Describing some of the major chiefdoms--Apalachee, the "Oconee" Province, Cofitachequi, and Coosa--the essays undertake to lay bare the social principles by which they operated. They also explore the major forces of structural change that were to transform the chiefdoms: disease and depopulation, the Spanish mission system, and the English deerskin and slave trades. And finally, they examine how these forces shaped the history of several subsequent southeastern Indian societies, including the Apalachees, Powhatans, Creeks, and Choctaws. These societies, the so-called native societies of the Old South, were, in fact, new ones formed in the crucible fired by the economic expansion of the early modern world.

Until its use declined in the nineteenth century, Indians of the southeastern United States were devoted to a caffeinated beverage commonly known as black drink. Brewed from the parched leaves of the yaupon holly (Ilex vomitoria), black drink was used socially and ceremonially. In certain ritual purification rites, Indians would regurgitate after drinking the tea. This study details botanical, clinical, spiritual, historical, and material aspects of black drink, including its importance not only to Native Americans, but also to many of their European-American contemporaries.

The Indians of the Southeast had the most highly centralized and complex social structure of all the aboriginal peoples in the continental United States. They lived in large towns and villages, built monumental mounds and earthworks, enjoyed rich religious and artistic achievements, and maintained a flourishing economy based on agriculture and complemented by time-honored hunting and gathering techniques. Yet they have remained relatively unknown to most scholars and laymen, in part because of a lack of collaboration between historians and anthropologists.Four Centuries of Southern Indians is a collection of nine essays which allow both historians and anthropologists to make their necessary contributions to a fuller understanding of the southern Indians. The essays span four hundred years, beginning with French and Spanish relations with the Timucuan Indians in northern Florida in the sixteenth century and ending with the modern Cherokees transported to Oklahoma. The interim topics include the social structure of the Tuscaroras of North Carolina in the eighteenth century, the role southern Indians played in the American Revolution, the removal of the southern Indians to the Indian Territory, and Cherokee beliefs about sorcery and witchcraft. This collection of essays and the cooperation between historians and anthropologists which it incorporates signify the beginning of what will undoubtedly prove a fruitful approach to the study of southern Indians.

In this reconstruction of the history of the Catawba Indians, Charles M. Hudson first considers the "external history" of the Catawba peoples, based on reports by such outsiders as explorers, missionaries, and government officials. In these chapters, the author examines the social and cultural classification of the Catawbas at the time of early contact with the white men, their later position in a plural southern society and gradual assimilation into the larger national society, and finally the termination of their status as Indians with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. This external history is then contrasted with the folk history of the Catawbas, the past as they believe it to have been. Hudson looks at the way this legendary history parallels documentary history, and shows how the Catawbas have used their folk remembrances to resist or adapt to the growing pressures of the outside world.

Between 1539 and 1542 Hernando de Soto led a small army on a desperate journey of exploration of almost four thousand miles across the U. S. Southeast. Until the 1998 publication of Charles M. Hudson’s foundational Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun, De Soto’s path had been one of history’s most intriguing mysteries. With this book, anthropologist Charles Hudson offers a solution to the question, “Where did de Soto go?” Using a new route reconstruction, for the first time the story of the de Soto expedition can be laid on a map, and in many instances it can be tied to specific archaeological sites.Arguably the most important event in the history of the Southeast in the sixteenth century, De Soto’s journey cut a bloody and indelible swath across both the landscape and native cultures in a quest for gold and personal glory. The desperate Spanish army followed the sunset from Florida to Texas before abandoning its mission. De Soto’s one triumph was that he was the first European to explore the vast region that would be the American South, but he died on the banks of the Mississippi River a broken man in 1542. With a new foreword by Robbie Ethridge reflecting on the continuing influence of this now classic text, the twentieth-anniversary edition of Knights is a clearly written narrative that unfolds against the exotic backdrop of a now extinct social and geographic landscape. Hudson masterfully chronicles both De Soto’s expedition and the native societies he visited. A blending of archaeology, history, and historical geography, this is a monumental study of the sixteenth-century Southeast.