Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast: Depopulation during the Early Historic Period (Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series)

Members of Hernando de Soto's 1540 march through the interior of the southeastern US, as well as other explorers at that time, described encounters with complex and powerful Indian chiefdoms. Until this work by Marvin T. Smith, first published in 1987, scholars had argued about the role that Europeans played in the disintegration of that Mississippian culture.