ple, permitted creation of towns, doubtlessly accelerated trading between
peoples, and promoted social hierarchy and ambitious architecture. Analy-
sis of Eastern Woodland human bones near Chesapeake Bay revealed that,
about a thousand years ago, maize suddenly increased from about per-
cent to half or more of local diets. The small early percentile may have been
derived from trading with Mississippians to the south. The larger amount
represents the diffusion of Mesoamerica’s invention, finally, halfway up the
Atlantic coast.^3
Before , the people later called Chickasaws were riverine, or wet-
lands, folk who clustered in villages along the Tombigbee River. There they
built ceremonial ‘‘platform’’ earthen mounds, and among the many ani-
mals they hunted was the bison. For some unknown reason—conceivably
the hostility of more-numerous people, proto-Creeks perhaps, east of the
river in Alabama—they withdrew a distance to the west and resettled the
greater Black Prairie. Here—again for reasons unknown—they ceased mak-
ing platform mounds but continued to plant crops and hunt bison. And it
was here that the Chickasaw encountered their first Europeans, late in .
These were Spaniards, remainders of an army of that had begun
an expedition of conquest, enslavement, and looting in Florida the previ-
ous year. Their leader was Hernando de Soto, a wealthy and famous vet-
eran of Francisco Pizarro’s invasions of Panama, Nicaragua, and Peru. The
foreigners had arrived at Tampa Bay with servants (some of them black
slaves), horses and mules for soldiers to ride, a swarm of hogs for meat, a
number of large dogs (some for herding swine, others for intimidating and
maiming enemies), and a huge store of iron collars and chains for natives
who would carry burdens. The Spaniards first headed northward through
western and central Florida, robbing graves, appropriating natives’ food
stores, raping women, and (inadvertently) spreading diseases for which
natives had no immunities. They stopped to rest their first winter in the
panhandle, in or near present-day Tallahassee, but were obliged to fight
fierce Apalachee warriors virtually every day. Undaunted, de Soto deter-
mined to press forward his exploration of the continent’s interior, and at
the beginning of , his expedition forded dangerous rivers in present-
day southwestern Georgia and meandered through the great piedmont in
a north-northeasterly track, into and through South Carolina, and finally
into western North Carolina and the mountains. De Soto and his men had
passed east of Georgia’s Etowah mounds, once the epicenter of the largest
Mississippian society in the lower South. In South Carolina they sought
in vain a town and people reportedly devoted to mining precious metals.