The Berry site in the upper Catawba Valley.

Hundreds of native chiefdoms, which included towns with monumental architecture and lesser-ranked settlements such as villages and farmsteads, dotted the sixteenth-century cultural landscape of southeastern North America.

These hierarchical societies were centered at large settlements with monumental earthen mounds and plazas (Anderson 1999; Anderson, Hally, and Rudolph 1986; Beck 2003; Blitz 1999; Hally 1994a, 1994b, 1996; Hally, Smith, and Langford 1990; Hudson 1976; King 2001, 2003; Knight 1989; Muller 1997; Scarry 1994, 1996; Smith 1986; Steponaitis 1986; Williams and Shapiro 1996). Many households lived in these capital towns. Other households lived in smaller villages and at farmsteads in the countryside between towns. Leaders in these societies probably inherited some leadership roles, or privileged access to them, from their relatives and ancestors, although knowledge and achievement undoubtedly earned public respect and status as well and entitled people to positions of power and authority. Chiefs rose to power within these societies through access to prestige goods and the exchange network through which they were traded and displayed, through the performance of ritual events, through accomplishments as warriors and diplomats, through genealogical claims and status relationships between different clan kin groups, or through cominbations of these and other strategies (Blitz 1993a, 1993b; Dye 1990, 1995; Knight 1986, 1990, 2001). Chiefdoms in the Southeast were inherently unstable social and geopolitical entities, and they experienced cycles of emergence, collapse, reemergence, and varying diplomatic relations even before native peoples of the Southeast first encountered Europeans and European material culture (Anderson 1994, 1996, 1999; Hally 1996; Williams 1994).

Spanish explorers and colonists visited dozens of different native chiefdoms during the sixteenth century, noting some differences in the nature and practice of power in different provinces, and in some cases noting hierarchical status relationships between different chiefdoms (Depratter et al. 1990; Hudson 1990, 1994, 1997; Hudson et al. 1984, 1985; Worth 1994). Spanish expeditions often demanded provisions from native towns, they sought out alliances with powerful chiefs, and their interactions with native peoples ranged from peaceful to brutally tragic (Dye 1990). Even their early presence in the Southeast, ephemeral as it was, dramatically altered the geopolitical landscape. Alliances with Spaniards, or against them, created new diplomatic relations between native chiefdoms. Some forms of Spanish material culture entered native networks of prestige goods exchange and display, compounding and complicating the effects of Spanish contact on native communities (Worth 2002).

Native chiefdoms of the Southeast changed dramatically between the 1500s and the beginnings of trade with English and French colonists in the 1700s (Galloway 1995; Hahn 2002; Hudson 2002; Martin 1994; Smallpox 2002; Smith 1987, 1989, 1994, 2000, 2002; Wesson 1999, 2002; Worth 2002). Chiefdoms collapsed, towns were abandoned, and new forms of communities emerged in across the Southeast. New forms of warfare, which developed in the 1600s in response to the settlement patterns and detente between different native communities and their allies and enemies (Dye 2002; Gallay 2002; Martin 1994). These developments correspond to the emergence of historically known tribal groups recognized by the names attached to them in the 1700s, including the Cherokees, Creeks, Chickasaws, Choctaws, and others (Braund 1993; Carson 1999; Galloway 1994; Knight 1994; Perdue 1998; Rodning 2001, 2002a, 2002b; Schroedl 1998, 2001a, 2001b; Sullivan 1995; Waselkov and Smith 2001; Wesson and Rees 2002; Worth 2001). These trends have received varying amounts of scholarly study by archaeologists and ethnohistorians in different parts of the Southeast.

What is less well known is what happened to native chiefdoms, especially those in the greater southern Appalachians, in the immediate aftermath of their earliest encounters with Europeans (Beck 1997, 2003; Beck and Moore 2002; Booker, Hudson, and Rankin 1992; King 2002; Levy, May, and Moore 1990; Moore 2002). The long-term outcomes of course are well known, as native chiefdoms unraveled, and different forms of communities emerged in new towns more widely spread across the landscape of the Southeast during the 1700s. The short-term implications, to the structure of Mississippian societies, of early European contact are not as well known, and the history of different chiefdoms undoubtedly varied from place to place across the Southeast in the 1500s. Did some chiefdoms benefit from alliances with, or victories against, early Spanish explorers and colonists, and how? What effects did early encounters with Europeans and European material culture have on the practices of leadership, community membership, trade and exchange, and other aspects of everyday life in native societies of the Southeast? What happened during early interactions between natives and Europeans? How does archaeological evidence complement, contradict, or correct impressions of these encounters as they were described by Europeans in written accounts?

Routes of Spanish expeditions in western North Carolina (after Beck 1997; Hudson 1990, 1994, 1997).

Current archaeological investigations in the upper Catawba Valley of western North Carolina are exploring these and other issues related to the outcomes of contact between Europeans and Mississippian peoples during the sixteenth century. I am collaborating with David Moore Warren Wilson College, Asheville) and Rob Beck (Northwestern University, Evanston Illinois) on an archaeological study of the Mississippian chiefdom centered at the Berry site and its interactions with Spanish explorers and colonists. A regional chiefdom had emerged in this province by the fifteenth or early sixteenth century. The role of communities in this area in exchange networks, connecting them to native polities in western Virginia and eastern Tennessee, may have been major driving forces in the ascendance of the town at Berry to its status as the capital of a regional chiefdom (Moore 2002; Meyers 2002; Ward and Davis 1999:262-263). Villages and farmsteads, whose households were affiliated with the chiefs housed at the Berry site, were also part of this chiefdom (Beck and Moore 2002). Recent excavations at Berry have unearthed clues about the Spanish settlement here and structures that may have housed soldiers stationed at Fort San Juan, which was built in 1567, and which was abandoned in 1568. Further excavations will shed light on whether the Spanish settlement at Berry displaced architecture and activity areas that were part of the early sixteenth-century town, on what pits and postholes were present in areas around these structures, and whether this space was reclaimed (or buried and abandoned) by people in the late sixteenth-century native town that outlasted the Spanish fort.

Fort San Juan was built under the direction of Captain Juan Pardo, and several other Spanish forts were built in the western Carolinas, as part of an effort to connect Spanish colonies in Florida and Mexico and meanwhile to form alliances with native groups living in the northern reaches of Spanish Florida. Fort San Juan was the major Spanish settlement on this frontier. Written accounts describe log stockades and earthen ramparts at other forts, and although there are no known written descriptions of what Fort San Juan looked like specifically, it is reasonable to conclude that it would have been fortified like its peers if not morseo because of its status as the major Spanish outpost in the western Carolinas.

The chronicles of the Pardo expedition indicate that native people built houses for them at Joara, which Pardo himself renamed Cuenca, after his hometown in Spain. Appartently these houses were built somewhat larger than the domestic dwellings of native households, but it would seem likely that these houses would have been built with aboriginal designs and materials, although Spaniards probably contributed their own toolkits and techniques towards building or renovating these structures. The native community tapped into its storehouses to feed the Spaniards at first, and the chiefs at Joara may also have tried to extract stored maize and other resources from neighboring chiefdoms to help sustain this arrangement.

When the expedition led by Pardo first visited Joara, it was the most powerful chiefdom in this part of the southern Appalachians. Chiefs from the Cherokee homeland, between 100 and 150 miles to the southwest, and from Siouan villages to the east and northeast traveled to Joara to meet Pardo (Hudson 1990). Written descriptions of the Pardo expeditions suggest that many of these visiting chiefs owed tributed and loyalty to the chiefs of Joara, unlike the situation thirty years earlier, when the chiefdom of Cofitachequi may have outranked Joara (Depratter 1994).

The expedition led by Hernando de Soto, almost thirty years before Pardo, represented the first visit by Europeans to western North Carolina, and they probably traveled through the upper Catawba River Valley en route to the upper Tennessee Valley. They visited the chiefdom of Cofitachequi on the Wateree River in South Carolina. They continued upriver, and visited the town to which they referred as Xualla, almost certainly the same as the town known to members of the Pardo expedition as Joara. This town was thought to be subject to or allied with the chiefs at Cofitachequi. Stores of maize and other resources were more abundant at Xualla than at other towns north of Cofitachequi and also in the wilderness thay had crossed south of Cofitachequi. Soto did not stay long at Xualla. He was bound for towns in eastern Tennessee.

Members of the Pardo expedition, by contrast, lived at Joara for more than a year. They participated in raids against villages in southwestern Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern North Carolina. The nature of these raids, and their effects on geopolitical relationships between native polities of the greater southern Appalachians, are not well known. The participation of Spanish soldiers, known for their brutality, in these raids may have made added to the devastation of towns and villages they sacked, and it may also have made deep impressions on the warriors who were their allies. As did many other Spanish colonists in the Southeast during the sixteenth century, those posted at Fort San Juan probably relied greatly on native households and granaries for their sustenance. Unlike earlier Spanish expeditions, which made only brief visits to Mississippian towns, some members of the Pardo expedition lived at Joara for more than one year and may have adopted some form of membership in the community. The nature of diplomacy between Cuenca and the town of Joara is not well known, but Fort San Juan and the five other Spanish forts in the western Carolinas were sacked and probably burned within a year and a half after they were built. What happened to the Spaniards themselves is unknown, although many of them probably died during this uprising.

The native town of Joara outlasted the Spanish outpost at Fort San Juan, and a native town known as Joara was still present at the beginning of the early seventeenth century. Eventually, the whole upper Catawba Valley was abandoned, and historic Catawba villages formed much further downriver, situated along the lower Catawba River partly because of new opportunities to trade with South Carolina colonists (Moore 2002). However, the town of Joara experienced another era in its life history during the late sixteenth century, after the Spaniards were gone, and before exchange networks connecting native people in western North Carolina with English colonists had developed in the late seventeenth century (Axtell 1997, 2001; Corkran 1962, 1969; Crane 1981; Goodwin 1977; Hahn 2002; Hatley 1989, 1995; Merrell 1987, 1989a, 1989b).

Berry (in gold) and other Mississippian mounds (in maroon) in western North Carolina. Another mound may have been present two to three miles east of the Berry site on the Johns River. Several mounds are present northwest of the Berry site along the headwaters of the Yadkin River. Note that the Berry site and the upper Catawba River Valley are close to the eastern edge of the Appalachians. Most of the mounds shown here are close to or within the boundaries of the historic Cherokee homeland.

Our current archaeological project explores the lifeways and social structure of the native town of Joara, the nature of the Spanish settlement of Cuenca, and the relationships between these groups of people at the frontier community situated here at the edge of both the Mississippian world and the Spanish colony in the Southeast. During the early 1500s, Joara was positioned at the crossroads of major east-west and north-south trading paths, and at the boundary between South Appalachian Mississippian chiefdoms to the south and southwest and Siouan societies associated with the Piedmont Village Tradition to the east and northeast (Beck and Moore 2002; Ward and Davis 1999). During the late 1500s, Joara and Cuenca both sat at the northern border of the domain then claimed as part of the Spanish empire (Hudson 1990, 1994, 1997; Worth 1994). The settlements known as Joara and Cuenca are both located at the Berry site, in the bottomlands near the confluence of Upper and Irish creeks in the upper Catawba Valley of western North Carolina. The nature of the European artifacts found at the Berry site (domestic debris rather than trade goods), the presence of a major aboriginal town here with a pyramidal platform mound (once twelve feet tall), and descriptions of landscapes in the chronicles of Spanish expeditions all confirm this identification.

Our project has now completed six seasons of fieldwork. Dave conducted excavations in the 1986 in the Berry mound and in the adjacent area, where there may have been a town plaza, like those commonly placed beside earthen mounds at other native towns in southeastern North America (Moore 2003). Rob determined during his 1996 survey that the native town at Berry may have covered as much as twelve acres, making it one of the largest, if not the largest, native town in all of western North Carolina (Beck 2003). His survey also identified smaller settlements in the surrounding area representing outlying villages and farmsteads associated with the Mississippian chiefdom centered at the Berry site.

Several suspected burned structures near the mound were identified during proton magnetometer surveys conducted by the late Tom Hargrove in 1996. These findings were confirmed by splitspoon core testing in 1997.

The pyramidal platform mound at the Berry site, which once stood twelve feet tall, was built with basketloads of earth (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).

Systematic testing with this handheld splitspoon corer revealed the presence of burnt architectural debris buried underneath plow zone deposits at the northern end of the Berry site (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).

During our 2001 field school, we exposed the corners and edges of three burned structures in the area north of the Berry mound.

The southeastern edge of Structure 1 at the Berry site (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).

The eastern edge of Structure 3 at the Berry site (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).

During our 2002 field season, we excavated a pit near the midpoint of a ring of burned structures north of the mound (the four burnt structures and the plaza in this area form a compound that is probably related to Fort San Juan and the related Spanish frontier town situated here), we excavated a smudge pit beside a fourth burned structure (the last stage of the Berry mound may postdate this structure and thus may postdate the abandonment of the Spanish settlement itself), we uncovered an arc of postholes that probably represents another structure of different architectural design, and we found several more European artifacts related to the presence of the Spanish fort and town built at the Berry site.

Several of the sixteenth-century brass artifacts found at the Berry site (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).

One of the sixteenth-century wrought iron nails from the Berry site (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).

Our field school in 2003 included stripping plow zone deposits to expose the matrix of burnt debris from Structure 3 in its entirety, an excavation trench into Structure 1 that yielded insights into the nature of its construction and abandonment, excavations of pit features in an area near another burnt structure, and excavation squares that exposed additional pits and postholes as well as stratigraphic profiles at the edge of the earthen mound. We have continued to find Spanish artifacts such as wrought nails, chain mail fragments, brass beads, brass lacing tips, and ceramics.

	Feature 23 at the Berry site (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).
	Feature 25 at the Berry site (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).

	Pit features near Structure 2, the northernmost structure (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).
	Postholes and stratigraphic profiles near Feature 7, beside the southwestern edge of the mound (courtesy of Warren Wilson College).

Our plans for 2004 are to concentrate on exposing pits and postholes between and around the four burnt structures in this area north of the mound, in the interest of learning more about the spatial layout of structures in this part of the site. We are interested in learning whether the Spanish compound in this part of the Berry site displaced structures and activity areas that were part of the sixteenth-century native town and whether this area was reclaimed as part of the late sixteenth-century native town that outlasted the Spanish settlement.

Structure 3 at the Berry site (courtesy of Warren Wilson College). Stripping plow zone deposits above this structure, which have yielded abundant amounts of native pottery and lithic artifacts, has exposed the matrix of burnt debris from this structure in its entirety. The concentration of daub near the middle may represent a daubed smokehole that fell on a hearth when the roof collapsed. Several burnt posts are still in place in the ground near the edge of the structure, and roof timbers radiate outward from the center like spokes of a wheel, and a doorway is located at the southwestern corner of the structure. The gray strip encircling the structure, which is roughly eight meters square, represents the fill placed in the structure basin between the wall posts and the edge of the basin in which the structure was built. South of the structure are several postholes that may represent part of a stockade.

Structure 1 at the Berry site (courtesy of Warren Wilson College). Excavation squares near the corner of this structure, further north and west than the section of the structure shown here, have revealed burnt posts and timbers from the roof; posts and plans from benches; deposits placed across the collapsed remnants of this structure to bury it after it had burned down; and several artifacts on the floor, including native pots, a bear hide blanket resting on a plank that was presumably part of a bench, a soapstone pipe, and chain mail fragments. Some timbers have notches that may have been cut with metal tools. Wrought nails have been found in plow zone deposits near and above this structure but have not been found embedded within this matrix of burnt architectural debris. The entryway to this structure is placed at its westernmost corner. All indications are that this structure was built in an aboriginal style, as were the three others in this area of the Berry site, although Spanish techniques and tools may have contributed to its construction or renovation.