Charles Ewen and John Hann chronicle the discovery and excavation of the only known campsite of Hernando de Soto's ten-state odyssey during the sixteenth century. Located in downtown Tallahassee in sight of the state capitol, the site was rescued at the last minute from developers - a story almost as compelling as that of de Soto's expedition. The book has three parts: historical background, archaeological excavations at the site, and a retranslation of the sixteenth-century narratives relating to the winter encampment. A prologue and epilogue fit the work into the wider context of the Contact Period. Of particular interest is the authors' discussion of the discovery, excavation, and preservation of the site. Showing how luck and timing are crucial factors in some important discoveries, they describe the interaction of archaeologists with private developers, state and city government, and the public and the media. Although it contains information that will be useful to scholars, the book is written in a popular style that makes it accessible to general readers.

In the 1500s, Hernando de Soto traveled throughout Central America and Peru, as well as the southeastern areas of the United States, in search of treasures and land for Spain. Although he may have had Spain’s best interests at heart, de Soto and his expedition left a deadly trail of disease in their wake. De Soto would never find the rumored riches he sought. But he did discover the Mississippi River. Labeled the most brash of all conquistadors by the time he was only thirty-six years old, readers will relish the adventures of the Spanish-born explorer on his quests.

For the first time, a book that tells the truth about Hernando de Soto's legendary expedition across what would become the United States, where he squandered a fortune in gold won in the conquest of Peru, and drove himself slowly mad searching for a second Inca empire. Maps and line drawings.

From 1539 to 1542 Hernando de Soto and several hundred armed men cut a path of destruction and disease across the Southeast from Florida to the Mississippi River. The eighteen contributors to this volume?anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and literary critics?investigate broad cultural and literary aspects of the resulting social and demographic collapse or radical transformation of many Native societies and the gradual opening of the Southeast to European colonization.

Originally published in hardcover in 1997 by The University of Georgia Press; published with additional material in 2018 by The University of Georgia Press.

In 1984, Joyce Rockwood Hudson accompanied her husband, anthropologist Charles Hudson, on a 4,000-mile trek across the Southeast. His objective was to retrace and verify the route taken by Hernando de Soto four and a half centuries earlier. The effort would bring into question, and ultimately supplant, much of what was earlier thought to be the course of the Spanish explorer's journey. This is the journal Joyce Hudson kept during that trip. A kind of scholar's version of Blue Highways, the book is a warmly humane and almost daily account of the people the Hudsons met, the places they saw, and the things they did as they searched for De Soto's trail beneath railroad tracks and two-lane blacktops, along riverbanks and mountain ridges. Thus it is largely a travel story about rural and small-town life in eleven states, from Florida to Texas. Descriptions of the region's everchanging terrain, vegetation, and climate fill the book--colored at times by Joyce Hudson's troubled musings about Americans' increasing disconnectedness from the land and irreverence for the past. Conveying the rewards and frustrations of lives spent in painstaking scholarly inquiry, Looking for De Soto also offers a firsthand glimpse into the daily work of anthropologists and archaeologists: the exchanges of ideas, the ventures through swamps and down deeply rutted farm roads, the endless porings over maps, charts, and notes. As if writing a detective story, the author suspensefully paces the narrative with the accrual of geographical, artifactual, and documentary evidence, punctuating it with false leads and other setbacks, as mile after mile of the trail is redrawn. The story even has its villains--"pothunters" and private collectors; the builders of canals and dams that alter the courses of rivers and inundate ancient village sites; and the owners of corporate farms, who have leveled and eradicated ceremonial mounds with their massive agricultural machinery. Finally, a sense of the headlong cultural collision between Europeans and Native Americans pervades the book. De Soto and his six hundred conquistadores were the first Europeans to explore the interior of the southeastern United States and the only ones to witness its aboriginal society at its zenith. Hudson's evocation of this encounter so central to the history of the New World may well send readers on their own excursions into the past. Looking for De Soto is a fascinating journey through today's South, illuminated by a richly informed perspective on its earlier days.