An Archaeology of the Knowledge Produced about the Native American Peoples of Louisiana

This article attempts to establish the history of what was known about Native American societies in the Mississippi Valley, layer after layer, from the 16th century to the present day. Several types of information sources have emerged over the centuries: a great variety of colonial writings, especially French (official correspondence, travel writings, memoirs, histories); archaeological data collected since the 19th century; ethnographic studies, often accompanied by linguistic research, which were largely the work of amateurs until the end of the 19th century, thereafter of professionals; and lastly, Indigenous oral traditions. Our guiding thread will be the Natchez, who had already sparked the interest of French chroniclers in the 18th century, and were given greater anthropological substance by John Swanton in the early 20th century

Colonialism · Ethnography · Indigenous · Native american · Oral tradition · Traditional knowledge · Amazonian Archaeology and Ethnohistory · Archaeology and Natural History · Historical and Cultural Archaeology Studies