Savannah Images Project The capital, Coosa, featured a three platform mound, a large plaza, and numerous home dwellings. Most villages consisted solely of home dwellings and farming areas. The whole of the Coosa Chiefdom population is estimated to have been approximately 50,00 people. Prior to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors Hernando de Soto (1539-1541) and Tristan de Luna (1560), the Coosa had contact with and traded with other Mississippian cultures. These contacts led to exchanges of ideas, technologies, and styles, as evidenced by three distinct style variations found in pottery and artifacts discoved in archaeological excavations. The beginning of the fall of the Coosa Chiefdom came with the arrival of the Spanish. The sudden introduction of such a different culture and ideology, and, moreso, the diseases brought from Europe, greatly disrupted the Coosa's way of life. Disease decimated the population, and the Coosa Chiefdom - along with many of the other Mississippian cultures contacted by the Spanish - fell apart. Survivors came together in fewer, smaller villages, and soon began to develop their own new and unique cultures which were the forerunners to the Native American tribes which would become dominate in the wake of the Spanish expeditions and into the colonization of the country which would become America. Local area anthropology professors believe that, based on journal entries describing geographical features from Tristan de Luna's expedition, a Coosa village had been located within a few miles of Canyon Mouth Park, part of today's Little River Canyon National Preserve. As the Coosa Chiefdom dissolved and the Muskogee Creek evolved as a culture, it is highly likely that village sites existed near the confluence of the Little River and the Coosa River (covered today by Weiss Lake). |
Last updated: April 17, 2021