Jacob Holland-Lulewicz

JACOB HOLLAND-LULEWICZ, Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, was awarded funding in April 2023 to aid research on “The Temporality of the Post-Contact Landscape: A Microhistory of a Sixteenth-Century Ancestral Muskogean Town.” 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 questions with fragmented documentary and material records. In telling these histories, we often do not have access to key indicators of time, greatly affecting the narratives we construct. The work funded by this grant has been the construction of 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, Piachi’s history represents an invaluable case to understand broader processes of demographic change and institutional transformation in the context of initial Spanish colonization. The work funded by this grant has begun to challenge generalized narratives of “collapse” that are often used to characterize these histories. Indeed, new dating efforts indicate that Indigenous-colonizer dynamics were much more complex, and that initial contact with Spanish colonizers did not induce rapid collapse of the Indigenous town of Piachi nor of Indigenous social, political, or economic institutions, which remains resilient in the face of a new sociopolitical landscape.