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The complexity of the peoples originally populating the South East is properly growing and also getting filled in. This is very good news and once again it is been led by independent scholars. As you may well imagine, the world is now filled with unemployed archaeologists, historians, linguists and the like who will pursue real knowledge however handily ignored by academic ignoramuses.
Better, it is now clawing back the losses incurred and getting real surprising result. The South East anchored the northern end of a seaborne trade corridor that lead to Meso - America and then south to Peru as the Southern Anchor. This looks to be a purely Native trade system.
Meso - America itself looks to have been launched much earlier as the Western Anchor of the Bronze Age Sea route to the Mississippi, Bimini and through to Europe at Lewis island.. It also makes sense for trade on the Western coast of Meso - America to have linked directly to Peru as well and plausibly to South East Asia.
The real take home it that this trade was actually active upon contact. It never truly died out and depended on demand for commodities.
What in the heck were the Apalachicolas doing in the Appalachian Mountains?
Would you believe that
there was a fourth occupation of Etowah Mounds that no one is talking
about? The labeling of Upper Creeks, Middle Creeks and Lower Creeks by
British officials originally had no relevance to where the branches of
the Creek Confederacy lived.
Overnight, I received several personal emails about the 1703 map,
which heads the article on Cofitachequi. They were all puzzled by the
placement in bold letters of “Conchaqui ou Apalachicola” by French
cartographer Guillaume de l’Isle over much of Northeast Alabama,
Northwest Georgia and North-Central Georgia. They asked, “Isn’t that a
mistake? The Apalachicola were down on the Apalachicola River in
Florida. All the books and references say so.”
One remarked, “This map shows the Kowetas (Caouitas) in small print
and living in isolated locations of Tennessee and Georgia. I thought
that the Kowetas were the biggest and most powerful branch of the Creeks
back then and the Apalachicolas were kind of like a step-sister.”
\Who are the Apalasicora (Apalachicola)?
Although now assumed to be a small tribe from the Florida Panhandle
and extreme southeastern Alabama, the Apalachicola were actually the
“rank and file” people of the Apalache Kingdom, whose capital and elite
lived in northeast Georgia (see map). The word merely means
“Apalache People” in the Apalache Language, which was a mixture of
Panoan (Eastern Peru), Itsate (southern Mexico) and Muskogean (NE
Mexico). Aparasicora literally means
“From-Ocean-Offspring of” but probably infers descent from the first
civilization of Peru, the Paracus, In case, you are now confused, a
Muskogean R is pronounced like a rolled L. A Muskogean S is pronounced
either SH, TSH or JZH.
According
to French maps, the Conchaqui and Apalachicola were the same people –
Conchaqui merely being their French name. The French label was derived
from the frequent use of conch shells and pottery shaped like conch
shells in their rituals. In fact, for decades American archaeologists
have been puzzled by the discovery of bowls shaped like conch shells in
NW Georgia and SE Tennessee. They have labeled them “Dallas Culture
saddle shell bowls.”
Last gasp of the Apalache Kingdom
None of the 17th century maps of what is now the interior of
Southeastern United States jive with the official orthodoxy found in
university published text books. The last book published on the
Southeast in the 17th century was The Forgotten Centuries by
Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser [1994]. The book ends by
stating that the period between 1610 and 1674 was a time of silence,
when nothing is known about what was happening in the interior of the
Southeast.
Not true. The problem was that Hudson used his adoring students to
do his research and they were just that . . . neophytes. They lacked
the broad swath of knowledge and professional expertise in a wide range
of subjects to adequately interpret the evidence from the past. Their
teachers didn’t know the meanings of Native American words and in
reality, knew diddlysquat about the complexities of Muskogean history,
so the evidence was ignored.
In contrast, people like Marilyn Rae are an incredibly valuable
asset for the People of One Fire because while at Boston College, she
became proficient in the Iberian languages, plus acquired a broad
knowledge of Late Medieval and Renaissance Iberian history. Marilyn has
continued to study these subjects in the decades since then. She is
now learning Cherokee in order to build on that base.
The map below was produced in 1701 by Guillaume de l’Isle. Despite
being two years older than his better known 1703 map of the Southeast,
this map contains detailed information on the names and locations of
Muskogean villages. We learn that the Kowetas had four villages on the
Coosawatee River while the Conchaqui or Apalachicola had 20 villages on
the Etowah River. At this time, all the Kusate (Upper Creeks) were
living in Tennessee. The entire Coosa-Alabama River System was called
the Conchaqui River at this time. The Chattahoochee River was called
the Hitanacha or the Rio de Espiritu Santo.
An earlier version of the Creek Confederacy was geographically
associated with the Alabama-Coosa-Etowah River system and led by the
Apalachicola. We now know from the “Original Creek Migration Legend”
that the first “People of One Fire” was formed by the Alabama,
Chickasaw, Kusate (Cussata) and Apike (Abeika). Apparently, the
Apalachicola and Coweta became members. Apparently, the alliance
collapsed during the Yamasee War, because even though the Apalachicola
continued to live in NW Georgia until at least the 1760s, the name of
the river changed to Coosa.
This cartographic information ties directly to some intriguing
photographs I saw in 2006, while doing research on Etowah Mounds for the
Muscogee-Creek Nation. In 1955, Lewis Larsen asked the state Parks
Department to strip the sod off on the area around the largest
earthworks at Etowah Mounds. Aerial photographs were then made from a
low flying airplane or helicopter to determine potential excavation
areas.
On the large plaza were revealed two lines of extremely large,
perfectly round building footprints, adjoining a massive rectangular
building with a rectangular wing. There appeared to be 12 round
buildings, about 50 feet in diameter. They were also perfectly
aligned. I had never seen any village plan like this one in the
Southeast. Also, being in the topsoil, these structures post dated when
it was believed that Etowah Mounds were abandoned . . . around 1600 AD
or earlier.
I have not been allowed access to the 1955 photos again by the
Antonio Waring Archaeological Laboratory at the University of West
Georgia, but was able to enhance 2015 satellite imagery to prove that I
was telling the truth. The residue of black earth is no longer round
after 60 years of mowing and rain, but you can still see the footprints
of buildings, when mono-spectrum enhancement is used.
I showed copies of the photos to several Georgia archaeologists and
asked them, who could have built such an unusual site plan? I received
that oh-so-typical Cheshire Cat grin that means, “You ignorant peasants
are so stupid.” I was told that they were “Cherokees.” It was
obvious that they didn’t want to say anymore.
No way Jose’. Cherokee houses were about 15 feet in diameter and
scattered randomly around a village site. Also, in 1818, The Rev. Elias
Cornelius, a Natural Science professor at Yale University visited
Etowah Mounds, when it was still in the Cherokee Nation. He said that
the ruins were completely covered in trees about 40 to 100 years old.
Three Cherokee “chiefs,” who accompanied him, told him that their people
did not build the mounds and they didn’t know who did.
The
entire site had been covered in trees when they arrived in the Etowah
Valley about 25 years earlier. In 1818, there were at least 14 mounds
associated with the site; five on the south side of the Etowah River.
The big mound was also shaped very differently than what you see
today. Mound A was extensively “mined” in the 1800s by amateur
collectors, who paid the owners of the property $200 a day to dig there.
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Now we know that the Apalachicolas are the primary candidates for a
fourth occupation of Etowah Mounds in the 1600s. However, to admit that
would mean that a dozen or more archaeology books would have to be
re-published.
It turns out that this very unusual site plan for the last town at
Etowah does jive with the drawings of Apalache towns that were published
in Charles de Rochefort’s book in 1658. The royal family and priests
lived in rectangular compounds, built of stone and plastered with
clay. The elite such as merchants and military commanders lived in
large round houses, typical of South America. The commoners, who spoke a
language more similar to modern Muskogee, lived in small rectangular
houses.
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