It has been fun over the past weeks writing about Mavila — or Mabila as it is sometimes spelled.
The coastal Alabama city of Mobile is named for that battle. It has also been an easy undertaking because, though the event is neglected in American history textbooks, it is well documented by the four principle chroniclers of the De Soto expedition. Given the fact that the event occurred five centuries ago, those who care to do the research have available to them some fairly good resources.
What happened on Oct. 18, 1540, in what is today Alabama is beyond dispute. The violent confrontation between Tuscaloosa’s warriors and De Soto’s knights was a monumental encounter altering the destinies of Native Americans and Europeans alike. However, given the fact that the event was so noteworthy, we have no idea where exactly it took place. Professional archaeologists sifting through the debris of mid-16th century native towns say that the battle site remains illusive.
Finding the location of the battle depends in large measure on how accurate scholars are in reconstructing the overall route taken by De Soto from his winter camp in Florida to his next winter camp in Mississippi. Some 75 years ago when many were observing the 400th anniversary of the expedition, anthropologist John Swanton published an official report on the likely route. The problem is that archaeologists today, with the help of new technologies and discoveries, question Swanton’s line of march.
I’ve been fortunate to have met some of the most distinguished scholars at the forefront of the search for Mavila. Back in the late 90s when I was riding my horse along trails through the Southeastern United States, I based my travels on the route mapped out by anthropologist Charles Hudson of the University of Georgia. On the two occasions we met, all he would say is that Mavila could well have been at the Old Cahawba site southwest of Selma which has a mound in a sixteenth-century palisaded town.
Another scholar I met more recently is Professor Vernon Knight of the University of Alabama. He co-chaired a 2006 conference called “The Search for Mabila,” edited a book of the same name published in 2009 and leads of a multidisciplinary team looking for the battle site. The pool of talent excites high expectations. He is working with anthropologists, historians, linguists, geographers, geologists and NASA scientists using satellite technology. The collaboration, he believes, will yield results.
Knight told me that one of the team’s projects has been to hold periodic area artifact shows in which farmers in the Alabama floodplain bring in their finds to have them identified and catalogued. The hope is that eventually a farmer will bring in triangular arrowheads and some Spanish artifacts. Problematic, he lamented, is that fewer people are farming and that lands once worked by the plow are now planted in pine.
Knight believes that Mavila is located somewhere in the agriculturally rich floodplain of the Alabama River because the chroniclers describe clusters of towns around Mavila. There is archaeological evidence here of population density based on intensive corn cultivation. And there is another imprint on the region that could bear fruit. The chronicler Garcilasco de la Vega wrote that during the month in which the Spaniards camped around the ruins of Mavila, detachments went out into the surrounding countryside in all directions for four leagues (about twelve miles) and torched the towns. “Any legitimate candidate for Mavila,” says Knight, “must be surrounded by the remains of other settlements, which will superficially look alike because they have all been burned.”
The same trip that took me to see Professor Knight in Tuscaloosa also led me to Dr. Jack Bergshesser who oversees Old Cahawba State Historical Park and who suspects that this could be the site of Mabila. He walked me over to a map on the wall of the visitor center and pointed out the configuration of the old Indian village with the palisade, the ditch and the mound. The problem for me, I told him, was that none of the four chroniclers mentions a mound at Mabila or a river nearby. Rather a chronicler wrote that the “Christians” drank from a nearby pond whose water was tainted by the blood of the dead and dying. Why drink from a dirty pond when the Alabama River is just a few yards away? Bergshesser admitted that there were other plausible candidates for Mavila and recommended that I speak to Ned Jenkins who is a respected member of Dr. Knight’s search team. Jenkins, he informed me, was director of the Fort Toulouse National Historic Park near Montgomery.
That opportunity to visit Ned Jenkins came a few days ago when I made a detour to Fort Toulouse on my way to participate in the 150th anniversary of the Civil War battle of Olustee. He was good enough to see me even after the park officially closed. Not only is he an active participant in Dr. Knight’s team of scholars looking for Mavila, his masterly summary of what archaeological signatures are likely to be found at the site constituted chapter six of Knight’s book “The Search for Mabila: The Decisive Battle between Hernando de Soto and Chief Tascalusa.”
According to Ned Jenkins, the site of the battle, whether Old Catawba or not, should give up certain artifacts that one would expect from a place of violent conflagration. There should be a plethora of human bones, some charred and some showing signs of trauma from sharp implements of steel. There should be the bones of pigs and butchered horses. There should be an abundance of discolored freshwater pearls and Spanish metal objects. And, because the palisade and houses were said to be covered in a thick daub, one of the most important archaeological signatures should be a vast amount of orange-colored, brick-like fired clay and daub. When I asked Jenkins about Catawba, he said simply that it should not be discounted.
All the seekers with whom I spoke in Alabama are of one mind on an important point. They agree with Vernon Knight that the lost battle site of Mavila is the predominant historical mystery of the Deep South. And they persevere not to satisfy the agenda of local pride but to seek knowledge for its own sake. Such knowledge will inevitably lead to a greater understanding of what happened that fateful October day in 1540.
Bill Andrews is a retired college history professor who lives in Columbia.