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.

Patricia Galloway is an assistant professor of archival enterprise and digital asset management in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of the award-winning Choctaw Genesis, 1500-1700, and the editor of The Southeastern Ceremonial Complex: Artifacts and Analysis, both published by the University of Nebraska Press.