Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians

LIGHT ON THE PATH

The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians

Edited by

THOMAS J. PLUCKHAHN

and ROBBIE ETHRIDGE

THE UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA PRESS

Tuscaloosa

For Dr. Charles Hudson

Copyright © 2006

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487–0380

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Typeface: AGaramond

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Science-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Light on the path : the anthropology and history of the southeastern Indians / edited by Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge.

p. cm.

Contains much of the proceedings of a day-long symposium honoring Charles Hudson on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Georgia.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-1500-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8173-1500-4

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-5287-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN-10: 0-8173-5287-2

1. Mississippian culture—Southern States. 2. Chiefdoms—Southern States. 3. Indians of North America—Southern States—History. 4. Indians of North America—Southern States—Antiquities. 5. Southern States—History. 6. Southern States—Antiquities. 7. Hudson, Charles M. I. Pluckhahn, Thomas J. (Thomas John), 1966—II. Ethridge, Robbie Franklyn, 1955—E78.S65L54 2006

975.004'97—dc22

2005019255

ISBN-13: 978-0-8173-8419-7 (electronic)

Contents

Figures

Preface

Introduction

Thomas J. Pluckhahn, Robbie Ethridge, Jerald T. Milanich, and Marvin T. Smith

1. The Nature of Mississippian Regional Systems

David J. Hally

2. Lithics, Shellfish, and Beavers

Mark Williams and Scott Jones

3. The Cussita Migration Legend: History, Ideology, and the Politics of Mythmaking

Steven C. Hahn

4. Coalescent Societies

Stephen A. Kowalewski

5. A Bold and Warlike People: The Basis of Westo Power

Eric Bowne

6. New Light on the Tsali Affair

William Martin Jurgelski

7. A Sprightly Lover Is the Most Prevailing Missionary: Intermarriage between Europeans and Indians in the Eighteenth-Century South

Theda Perdue

8. The Historic Period Transformation of Mississippian Societies

Adam King

9. Bridging Prehistory and History in the Southeast: Evaluating the Utility of the Acculturation Concept

John E. Worth

10. Creating the Shatter Zone: Indian Slave Traders and the Collapse of the Southeastern Chiefdoms

Robbie Ethridge

References Cited

Contributors

Index

Figures

1.1. Middle sixteenth-century polities in the Valley and Ridge province

1.2. Locations of Mississippian chiefdoms in northern Georgia

1.3. Middle sixteenth-century paramount chiefdoms described in Spanish documents

1.4. Distribution of chiefdoms during the Late Savannah period

1.5. Distribution of chiefdoms during the Middle Lamar period

1.6. Extent of alluvial floodplain soil in the Coosa River drainage

1.7. The rise and fall of chiefdoms during the Late Savannah to Early Lamar transition

2.1. Late Mississippian sites in Georgia

2.2. Mississippian settlement patterns in a small, unnamed stream valley within the Oconee Valley

2.3. Lutcapoga Square Ground

6.1. Tsali historical marker

6.2. The first page of Nanih's memorial

6.3. William Holland Thomas

8.1. Plan map of Lodge D-1 at Macon Plateau

8.2. Plan map of Level E1, Unit 37, Hiwassee Island

8.3. Plan map of the Moundville site showing inferred social divisions

8.4. Plan map of A. R. Kelly's Structure 3 at Etowah

8.5. Location of Structure 3 at the Etowah site

Preface

This volume contains much of the proceedings of a day-long symposium honoring Charles Hudson on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Georgia. Charles Hudson has had a long and distinguished career as an anthropologist, educator, and scholar. He has authored or coauthored eight books (Guilds and Hudson 2002; Hill et al. 1972; Hudson 1970a, 1976, 1990b, 1997b, 2003; Milanich and Hudson 1993) and edited or coedited another six (Ethridge and Hudson 2002; Hudson, ed. 1971, 1975, 1979, 1985; Hudson and Tesser 1994). In addition, Hudson has authored or coauthored more than 20 book chapters (Ethridge and Hudson 1998; Hudson and Phillips 1968; Hudson 1974, 1975, 1979, 1981, 1982b, 1984, 1985a, 1985b, 1985c, 1986, 1987a, 1990a, 1992, 1993b, 1994, 1995, 1997a, 2001; Hudson, DePratter, and Smith 1989, 1993; Hudson, Smith, and DePratter 1988, 1990; Hudson, Smith, DePratter, and Kelley 1989a; Hudson, Worth, and DePratter 1990) and an equal number of journal articles (Booker et al. 1992; DePratter et al. 1983, 1990; Harper and Hudson 1971, 1973; Hudson 1966a, 1966b, 1970b, 1977, 1978a, 1978b, 1982a, 1987c, 1988; Hudson, Butler, and Sikes 1975; Hudson, DePratter, Smith, and Anderson 1994; Hudson and Smith 1990; Hudson, Smith, and DePratter 1984; Hudson, Smith, DePratter, and Kelley 1989b; Hudson, Smith, Hally, et al. 1985, 1987).

Among the numerous awards and honors Hudson has received for his scholarship are two James Mooney Awards from the Southern Anthropological Society, the Rembert W. Patrick Book Award from the Florida Historical Society, and an American Association for State and Local History Commendation. In 1993, he was named to a Franklin Professorship by the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia for his outstanding contributions to scholarship. Most recently, in 2004, Hudson received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Although Hudson's research is impressive, his career is distinguished as much by his skill as an educator as by his scholarship. Over the course of his tenure at the University of Georgia, Hudson has guided to completion 11 theses, several honors theses, and seven dissertations. These studies cover a diverse array of topics, from sociocultural studies of contemporary or recent historic populations such as the Irish Travelers of Georgia (Harper 1977), Polish settlers in Louisiana (Hoffman 1989), Russian orthodox practitioners (Stockley 1973), and rural southern turpentine workers (Wright 1979) to ethnohistoric and archaeological studies of southeastern Indian geography (Carleton 1989), belief systems (Hubert 1976; Keyes 1993), social structure (DePratter 1983; Ethridge 1984b, 1996; Garrow 1968; Hickerson 1996; Persico 1974), language (King 1975), plant use (Cofer 1978), and material culture (Kelly 1988; Van Horne 1993; M. Williams 1983). Hudson's courses were always among the most popular in anthropology at the University of Georgia, and he was recognized as Outstanding Teacher, as well as Outstanding Honors Professor, in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences for three and four years, respectively. In 1994, Hudson received the Josiah B. Meigs Award for excellence in teaching.

Although—as Hudson put it in his closing remarks at the symposium—he never turned a trowel of dirt on an archaeological site, some of his closest colleagues and collaborators have been archaeologists and many of his students have gone on to become archaeologists. His imprint on Southeastern archaeology is as deep as it is for ethnohistory. Therefore, we thought it proper to have a session honoring his work and career at the Fifty-Eighth Annual Meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference, held in Chattanooga, Tennessee, November 14–17, 2001.

The original participants in the symposium were (in order of presentations): Thomas Pluckhahn, Jerald Milanich, Steven Kowalewski, John Worth, David Hally, Claudio Saunt, Steven Hahn, Adam King, Mark Williams, Scott Jones, Marvin T. Smith, Theda Perdue, Robbie Ethridge, Bill Jurgelski, Dan Morse, Phyllis Morse, Richard Polhemus, Wayne Van Horne, Chester DePratter, Eric Bowne, Frank Schambach, and Louis DeVorsey. Hudson ended the session with some reflections on his work as an anthropologist and as a teacher.

The essays in this volume are taken mostly from that symposium. Chester DePratter, Dan and Phyllis Morse, Frank Schambach, Richard Polhemus, and Wayne Van Horne decided to not publish their oral presentations; Claudio Saunt and Louis DeVorsey had promised their papers to other publications; and Theda Perdue gave a presentation not intended for publication, but she contributed another paper for this volume. Hudson did not wish to publish his closing comments.

We would like to thank the Southeastern Archaeological Conference and the University of Georgia Department of Anthropology for sponsoring the symposium and a reception also honoring Dr. Hudson. We would also like to thank the organizers of the Fifty-Eighth Annual Meeting, Lynne Sullivan and Nick Honerkamp, for all their help and patience in organizing both the symposium and the reception. We are deeply indebted to George Sabo and Jason Baird Jackson for their careful readings of the manuscript and for their insightful suggestions for its improvement. We also acknowledge Jay Johnson for his advice on how to think about and discuss the paradigm shift that we present in the introduction. We thank Kathy Cummins for her careful copy editing and the staff of The University of Alabama Press for seeing the manuscript through to completion. We would also like to thank Sally Stassi and the Williams Research Center at The Historic New Orleans Collection and Max Williams and the University of Mississippi Office of Research and Sponsored Programs for support in securing the permissions for the cover illustration. Many thanks as well to several friends and colleagues for helpful advice and general support, including Joyce Rockwood Hudson, James Merrell, Maureen Meyers, Steve Kowalewski, Dave Hally, Jim Knight, Ramie Gouegon, Sammy Smith, Paige West, Barney Pavo-Zuckerman, Becky Zarger, and Molly Boland. We are also grateful to all of those who attended the symposium and all of those who contributed papers.

Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Hudson. He has inspired and taught two generations of scholars as well as countless other undergraduates and graduates who have passed through the University of Georgia over the past 30 or so years. His deep knowledge of southeastern Indian life and the social history framework he has so long advocated impress all of us who have come within his sphere of teaching, research, and scholarship. We have collected and published these essays in his honor.

Tom Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge

Introduction

Thomas J. Pluckhahn, Robbie Ethridge, Jerald T. Milanich, and Marvin T. Smith

However uncertain our road at many points, we are, it seems to me, at the present hour better placed than our predecessors to see a little light on the path ahead.

—Marc Bloch (1953:14)

When Marc Bloch wrote these words—working from his knapsack as he fought with the French resistance in World War II—he was describing a new way of doing history. This new vision for history would later come to be known as the Annales school. Bloch and his fellow Annalistes called for a far broader vision of history than the narrative style of political events that had prevailed until that time. It is our contention that the past 20 years have witnessed a change in the study of the prehistory and history of the Native peoples of the American South. This new way of thinking, influenced by the Annales school, has been of comparable importance to those of us who work within the region.

This paradigm shift is the bridging of prehistory and history as a way of fashioning a seamless social history that includes not only the sixteenth-century Late Mississippian period and the eighteenth-century colonial period but also the largely forgotten, but critically important, century in between. The shift is in part methodological, as it involves combining methods from anthropology, history, and archaeology. It is also conceptual and theoretical in that it uses historical and archaeological data to reconstruct broad patterns of history—not just political history with Native Americans as a backdrop nor simply an archaeology with added historical specificity but a true social history of the southeastern Indians themselves, spanning their entire existence in the American South.

The scholarship underlying this shift comes from many directions, but much of the groundwork can be attributed to Charles Hudson, Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Georgia. As the man who literally wrote the book on the Indians of the southeastern United States, Hudson perhaps requires little introduction. Our purpose here is to map out Hudson's intellectual path because his personal journey reflects, in large part, the history of scholarly thought on the Native South in the past 50 years. It also reflects the paradigm shift that occurred as he began to rethink his own work on southeastern Indians and inspired others to do the same.

Born and raised in rural Kentucky, Hudson attributes his initial interest in anthropology to his first memorable encounter with people not like himself. This occurred at the age of 17 after he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force (within a few weeks after the outbreak of the Korean War). From 1951 to 1953, Hudson was stationed in Japan in a highly analytical branch of military intelligence. Raised in an ethnically homogenous area of Kentucky, Hudson found Japan mystifying.¹ This first experience with a foreign culture, combined with the intellectual habits of mind demanded in the intelligence branch of the Air Force, expanded his horizons and predisposed him to the study of anthropology.

Following his discharge from the Air Force in 1953, Hudson worked for three years before entering the University of Kentucky in 1956. With his intellectual curiosity piqued by his experiences during the war, he gravitated to anthropology as a means of thinking about some of the ultimate questions of human existence. Hudson earned a bachelor's degree with High Distinction and Departmental Honors in Anthropology from Kentucky in 1959. Awarded a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and a Southern Fellowship Foundation stipend, Hudson entered graduate school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) later the same year.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the combined Department of Sociology and Anthropology at UNC was dominated by sociologists, though the two fields would separate during Hudson's stay there. There was also a serious rift among anthropologists, with the fault line falling between social anthropologists (led by John Honigmann) and archaeologists (dominated by Joffre Coe). The UNC Department of Anthropology trained its graduate students in four-field anthropology, and Hudson was required to take archaeology courses and to pass a comprehensive exam in that subdiscipline. Hudson remembers taking one or two archaeology courses from Coe. However, the fact that he had chosen to work with Honigmann probably truncated Hudson's relationship with Coe. Hudson (1993a) appreciated the holism of the four-field approach in anthropology, but he considered himself a social anthropologist, and archaeology seemingly had little to offer to his development as an ethnographer. As a graduate student, I did not know that I would have need of archaeologists and their research, Hudson now reflects.

Hudson's advisor, John Honigmann, was a notable culture and personality theorist. Never himself attracted to the culture and personality school of anthropology, Hudson recalls the admirable intellectual honesty with which Honigmann one day admitted in class that the body of theory to which he had devoted his life's work was in deep decline. It was perhaps because of this revelation that Honigmann permitted his graduate students considerable leeway, a latitude that Hudson would later allow in mentoring his own graduate students. This may also help account for Hudson's own skepticism about grand theorizing (Hudson 1993a, 1997a). The period of his intellectual development witnessed the crash and burn of a number of grand theories—several theories of the origins of religion, culture and personality theory, British structural-functionalism, Claude Lévi-Strauss's structuralism, and the New Archaeology, to name only a few.²

As Hudson remembers it, the state of the field of anthropology at the time of his graduate work was quite fractured theoretically. There was no single mature theory that every anthropologist should uphold, he recalls. The diversity within the field was mirrored in the program at UNC. Hudson shared classes with several other graduate students who would go on to fame in anthropology and other fields, including Richard Nonas, Arthur Rubel, Norman Whitten, and Richard Preston. They were friends and drinking buddies, but there was no shared intellectual paradigm, recalls Hudson.

Hudson was drawn to the study of belief systems as a master's student. What interested me most was how people explain the world they believe exists, he remembers. Meyer Fortes's Oedipus and Job in West African Religion (1959) was a major influence during this period. Hudson's master's thesis, completed in 1962, was a study of the belief system of rural whites in a North Carolina community (Hudson 1962).

After receiving his master's degree, Hudson remained at UNC to pursue his doctoral degree. Once in the doctoral program, and while still developing his interest in belief systems, Hudson was also drawn to history. Late in his graduate training he read E. E. Evans-Pritchard's article Anthropology and History (1962), with its argument that social anthropology was not so much a science as it was a form of social history. Hudson believed that Evans-Pritchard was correct, but he also recalls not knowing how to go about incorporating history into the type of anthropology he was being trained to do. Evans-Pritchard's argument was astonishing to me—it was heretical, recalls Hudson. Likewise, Hudson read the work of Marc Bloch (1953) while at UNC. There was an animating spirit in it that I really liked, he remembers, but it too was not something that I could really use. To Hudson's thinking, the contribution of Marc Bloch was to point out that there was a way of thinking about the human social experience in time that can be done, and we should be doing it.

Anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s simply did not provide the intellectual equipment needed to study indigenous people historically. Instead, socio-cultural anthropology was dominated by synchronic frameworks for thinking about culture and society. Lévi-Strauss's structuralism and the British school of structural-functionalism were still strong in Europe. American anthropology developed ethnoscience, cultural ecology, cultural materialism, and other varieties of anthropological theory. None of these paradigms took history seriously, and some were actually hostile to it; in an effort to be positivistic and scientific, many cultural anthropologists proclaimed themselves to be ahistorical. Thus, they were left accounting for culture change either through grand theory or through simplistic models such as assimilation, acculturation, and declension.

This is not to say that all anthropologists ignored history. Melville Herskovits, for example, was an early American anthropologist who advocated a historical perspective. And in 1954 Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin, an anthropologist at Indiana University, founded the American Society for Ethnohistory (ASE), which was devoted to the study of American Indian history. The field of ethnohistory grew out of cases presented before the Indian Claims Commission, many of which required anthropologists or historians to serve as expert witnesses (Usner 1998:7). Although it would remain a relatively small society until recent years, from its inception the ASE included both historians and anthropologists and called for an interdisciplinary approach to doing American Indian history. Hudson joined the ASE as a doctoral student, but the field was still relatively new with only weakly developed methodologies. Although striving for a new way to put American Indians into American history, most ethnohistorians at this time used the conventional narratives on war, treaties, and policy for their framework (Usner 1998:4–7).

The emergence of ethnohistory and the ASE certainly inspired historians and anthropologists to do Indian history, but most of the subsequent scholarship focused on the Great Lakes and the Northeast (Usner 1998:4). In southern history, except for some notable exceptions such as Verner Crane (1929), Herbert E. Bolton (Bolton and Ross 1925), Robert S. Cotterill (1954), and David Corkran (1962, 1967), historians rarely took note of Indians except as background figures for European colonial affairs and most often as impediments to colonial expansion (Hahn 2004b; Usner 1998:1–13). Some historians based in Oklahoma such as Grant Foreman (1932) and Angie Debo (1934, 1941) wrote books on Indian removal and the period afterwards, but their treatments of pre-removal societies were typically brief (Usner 1998:6). All in all, the southern Indians simply did not figure much in the history of the South. Hudson (1971:1–2) would later comment that the southeastern Indians were the victims of a virtual amnesia in our historical consciousness.

At the time of Hudson's graduate studies, the study of the Native peoples of the South was dominated by the culture area paradigm as practiced by one of Franz Boas's students, John R. Swanton. Swanton had done most of his work in the first half of the twentieth century, and he died in 1958. Fifteen years after his death, Swanton continued to dominate the study of the southeastern Indians.³

Swanton was interested in the culture of the southeastern Indians. However, as a Boasian trained in the culture area paradigm, much of Swanton's work focused on the search for pristine cultural traits—those characteristics that had not been degraded through acculturation. At the time, scholars and lay people alike understood the southeastern Indians to be the most acculturated Indians in North America (they were even called collectively the Five Civilized Tribes). Accordingly, Swanton, in his search for pristine cultural traits, looked to the historic documents in the hopes of uncovering the real southeastern Indian. And through fieldwork with contemporary Indians, he sought to identify those pure cultural traits that had survived into the twentieth century (Usner 1998:2–3).

Swanton's interest in the historical documents was unusual for an anthropologist in the early twentieth century. Still, as Steven Hahn (2004b:xxiii) has noted, while Swanton pioneered the use of historical documents in his ethnographies, his research methods were less than meticulous. More important, Swanton's work was colored by his use of methods known as the ethnographic present and the declension model. The ethnographic present was an anthropological convention by means of which one depicted cultures synchronically in the present that were, in fact, wholly or partly defunct. The declension model was from history and presumed that once Indians became acculturated their traditional way of life became degraded or went into decline (Galloway 1997a:285; Hahn 2004b:xxiii; Perdue 1998:3–11).

The weaknesses of Swanton's approach to the past are perhaps most evident in his reconstruction of the route of Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto (Swanton 1985). Assuming that Indian towns did not move between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Swanton used contemporary place names to anchor the locations of several Indian towns encountered by Soto, an analytical technique that led his reconstruction astray (Smith 2000:82). More important, however, Swanton's use of the ethnographic present led him to collapse more than 300 years of history into a synchronic snapshot of southern Indian culture (e.g., Swanton 1969). Swanton's portrayals, as important as they have been, thus obscured most of the important social transformations for Native peoples that took place following European contact.

In fairness to Swanton, however, this transformation was also lost on most anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians at the time. To see evidence of this, one need only look to the way classes on the southeastern Indians were taught in the 1960s and early 1970s. Courses on the southeastern Indians were usually taught in anthropology departments, and they were typically divided into two types. There were North American archaeology courses that dealt with the prehistory of Native peoples according to culture area. And there were courses about the Indians of the Southeast with lectures usually organized around specific historic tribes, such as The Cherokees, The Creeks, The Timucuans, and so on. That there was a connection between prehistory and history, while not altogether lost on the professors who taught these classes, did not seem like a question that could be addressed profitably. In effect, there was an intellectual disconnect between pre-1500 and post-1600.

Considering the state of anthropology on the Native Southeast at the time, it should come as no surprise that Hudson felt ill prepared for his dissertation fieldwork. Hudson chose to do his dissertation work on the Catawba Indians of North Carolina. The Catawbas had recently terminated a part of their reservation, and Honigmann had received a small grant to do fieldwork among them in conjunction with this, a project that he passed on to his graduate student. The only formal preparation Hudson had for understanding the Catawbas was an introductory course on North American Indians taught by Coe. As an undergraduate he had read James Adair's History of the American Indians (1775), but he recalls not knowing what to make of it at the time. He also found useful concepts in the work of British social anthropologist Ian Cunnison, who had written about remembered history in African societies. Still, he felt poorly prepared for fieldwork with the Catawbas.

Hudson was also uncomfortable in the role of ethnographer, especially with the relationship between ethnographer and subject. I felt like I was an intruder among the Catawbas, he observes in retrospect. Later fieldwork reinforced these feelings. During the summers of 1965 and 1966, Hudson directed two ethnographic field schools among the Native populations of northern Canada, first in Great Whale River, Quebec, and next in Churchill, Manitoba. I was again uncomfortable in the role of ethnographer, Hudson recalls. These field schools marked Hudson's last ethnographic fieldwork.

The Catawba fieldwork profoundly affected Hudson's vision of anthropology. Ill at ease as an ethnographer and working within the context of an anthropology that was largely ahistorical (and having never taken a history class in the course of his studies), Hudson found himself unprepared for the historical contingencies that had contributed to the development of the contemporary Catawba people. His reading of works by Evans-Pritchard and Bloch provided the foundation for his nascent interest in social history, but it was his experience among the Catawbas that laid bare for him the fruitlessness of attempting to study a society without understanding its history.

After completing his Catawba fieldwork but while still writing his dissertation, Hudson was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Georgia (UGA) in 1964. His dissertation, entitled The Catawba Nation: A Social History, was completed the following year (Hudson 1965) and was subsequently published under the abbreviated title The Catawba Nation by the University of Georgia Press in 1970 (Hudson 1970a). In the Catawba book, Hudson ties together the two strands of interest that had emerged during his graduate student years: belief systems and history. The first half of The Catawba Nation is a narrative of the Catawbas in the early colonial years based on his reading of the primary sources available at the time. He also kept true to his interest in belief systems—how people understand their worlds—by presenting the Catawbas' conceptions of their own past in the second half of the book.

Although Hudson's book on the Catawbas received good reviews (see Berry 1971; Malouf 1972), Hudson himself now looks back on his dissertation research as unsatisfying. Examining the book today, one can see both a dilemma and a question taking shape. The dilemma concerned the focus of his career. As Hudson puts it, I made a major effort at teaching courses on comparative belief systems in my early career at the University of Georgia, but once I became more and more committed to research on the Indians of the Southeast I had to relinquish this interest in comparative belief systems. This was an excruciating decision, but one I had to make.⁴

But The Catawba Nation also reflects an emerging intellectual question, one that would shape all of Hudson's subsequent research. This was, how should anthropologists understand the historical forces that have shaped the people they study? As he describes it today, in The Catawba Nation Hudson could not account for how the Catawbas described in early historical documents had been transformed into the people he encountered in the course of his fieldwork—people who, to his eye, were little different from the rural, predominantly white, southern people among whom he had grown up.

A significant influence on Hudson's thinking during this period was the historical geographer Louis DeVorsey, professor of geography at UGA. At the prompting of his wife, Joyce Rockwood, Hudson sat in on a historical geography course she was taking from DeVorsey in the academic year 1968–1969. In Hudson's words,

I had never really experienced the thought processes of a historical scholar before sitting in on DeVorsey's class. His knowledge of printed and manuscript maps of the Southeast was vast. He was assigning such great things for his students to read: Lawson, Adair, Romans, Bossu, and especially Bartram. The anthropology I got into in graduate school was rather positivistic. DeVorsey was rigorous and exacting in his scholarship, but he was also humanistic. For the first time, I saw the possibility of doing historical research on the people in whom I was interested.

During his first years as a new professor, Hudson was also busy promoting the discipline of anthropology in the South, which he considered sorely underdeveloped (see Hudson 1982a). To this end, he was active in the organizing of the Southern Anthropological Society (SAS) and he served as president in 1973-1974. He organized, chaired, and served on the judging committee of the Mooney Award, a yearly book award from the SAS for the best book on the anthropology of the American South. (Hudson would later win this award twice, once in 1991 for The Juan Pardo Expeditions and again in 1999 for Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun.)

Hudson also worked diligently at building the anthropology department at UGA. He believed that a strong connection to history was one way to give the Department of Anthropology more presence in a southern institution. For a few years, he and some other of the faculty in anthropology lobbied for a southeastern focus for the Department of Anthropology. But others on the faculty disagreed, creating a strong undercurrent of tension. A few years later, when Hudson's group realized that the broader university sentiment was against them as well, they dropped the effort.

Hudson also became more involved in the American Society for Ethnohistory, and in 1992–1993 he would serve as president. In the ASE he found company in historians and like-minded anthropologists. In anthropology, Hudson joined with William Sturtevant and Raymond Fogelson—all three now considered founding figures in the ethnohistory of the southeastern Indians—to form a small, and for that time unusual, community of Southeastern anthropologists who understood the importance of merging history and anthropology.⁵ In the Department of History at UGA, he found an ally in Charles Crowe. This relationship would have wide repercussions in southeastern Indian ethnohistory, as one of Crowe's graduate students was Theda Perdue. Hudson served on Perdue's master's committee and later on her doctoral committee. Perdue, of course, went on to become one of the most renowned Southeastern ethnohistorians today, and she has acknowledged Hudson's influence on her thinking (Perdue 1998:ix-x). They are still close colleagues and friends.

Perdue was one of the first generation of scholars who would profoundly impact American history by taking the Indian side of the story seriously. The movement, which has come to be known as the New Indian History, developed within history when social historians opened up historical inquiry to subjects and people who had theretofore been deemed unimportant or ignored altogether—groups such as women, African Americans, and Indians.⁶ Perdue joined a cohort that included other well-known figures in Indian history, such as Francis Jennings, James Axtell, Bruce Trigger, Neal Salisbury, J. Leitch Wright, Michael Green, William McLoughlin, John Reid, and Gary Goodwin, among others. All put Indians at the center of their historical inquiry and designed new approaches for studying Native North American and colonial history.

Hudson also partook of and contributed to these developments. Throughout the late 1960s and 1970s, he organized symposia around the ethnohistory of