Ashley Ann Dumas

ASHLEY DUMAS, University of West Alabama, Livingston, Alabama, received a grant in April 2022 to aid research on “Native American Responses to Spanish Entradas in the American Southeast.” Archaeological survey and excavations in the Black Prairie region of central Alabama revealed several communities of late Mississippian farmsteads. Seriation of pottery styles, with the aid of numerous radiocarbon dates, suggests two waves of settlement during the sixteenth-century by people migrating from large river valleys. The new, hybrid communities were in place when the Hernando de Soto entrada arrived in 1540, which ended in a devastating battle at the town of Mabila. Dozens of pieces of Spanish metal, some clearly meant for Indigenous use, have been recovered from numerous prairie sites. Although settlement in the prairie persisted into the late sixteenth century, there ultimately appears to have been a coalescence of prairie peoples.