Jacob Holland-Lulewicz

What kinds of impacts did Spanish colonization have on the formation, livelihoods, vibrancy, maintenance, and dissolution of Indigenous towns? Archaeologists and ethnohistorians have been limited to addressing these crucial questions with fragmented documentary and material records. While extensive and illuminating, such work has been limited by constraints on resolving the temporality of institutional histories and the lived impacts of Indigenous-colonizer encounters. That is, in trying to tell these histories, we often do not have access to key indicators of time, greatly affecting the narratives we construct. With advances in absolute dating, archaeologists can now resolve these critical spans of time and can lend real temporality to the impacts of colonialism on Indigenous lives. The proposed project seeks to construct a high-resolution history via radiocarbon dating, tree-ring analysis, and chronological modeling for the Ancestral Muskogean town of Piachi, or the King site, in the Southern Appalachian region of northern Georgia (USA). Occupied across the threshold of Spanish contact (c. 16th century), and serving as one of the most completely and meticulously excavated sites dating to this period, Piachi’s history represents an invaluable case to understand broader processes of demographic change and institutional transformation in the context of initial Spanish colonization.