The Oldest South

My lack of internet access in DC left me with a lot of extra time, so I finished King Leopold’s Ghost sooner than I expected to and decided that I needed to buy something to read on the plane home, so I went to Second Story Books and looked around for something interesting and, importantly for several reasons, short.  I rather quickly found a book that was amazingly ideal for my purposes, started it on the plane on Friday and finished it last night.

Perspectives on the Southeast: Linguistics, Archaeology, and Ethnohistory is a collection of papers originally presented at a conference of the Southern Anthropological Society in 1992 on the subject of the Southeast at the time of Columbus.  It’s interesting how many of the books I’ve read recently have been connected, directly or indirectly, with the Columbian Quincentennial; in addition to this one, O Brave New People was published around the same time and for the same reason, and 1491 was inspired in a more roundabout way by the scholarly response to the anniversary as well.

The eleven papers from the conference that were included as chapters in the book (two others “were unable to be sufficiently condensed for inclusion in this volume” according to a note by the editor) cover a wide temporal and geographical spectrum, and while they mostly address the state of the Southeast in 1492 in some fashion, the primary focus is generally on later periods for which there is more documentation.  I found the linguistic chapters particularly interesting, of course, particularly Jack Martin’s on prehistoric language contact.  Some of the chapters attempt to answer questions by combining archaeological and historical (and to some degree linguistic) methods; Michael Hoffman’s investigation of the identity of the precolumbian inhabitants of eastern Arkansas is a notably convincing example, as is Geoffrey Kimball’s attempt to tie the Koasati to a prehistoric archaeological complex.

Emanuel Drechsel’s chapter on Mobilian Jargon, rehearsing arguments later used in his book on the subject, is interesting but I’m not sure I quite buy his interpretation.  He puts forth some fairly convincing evidence of the pidgin’s precontact origin, but his further arguments that it was the lingua franca of the Mississippian culture are less convincing.  They seem to be based largely on the close correspondence between the geographical range of the two phenomena and the assumption that a material culture as widespread and yet broadly similar as the Mississippian must have needed a common language, for which a pidgin is an obvious choice.  The geographical argument seems a bit dubious to me, since the attestations of the range of use of Mobilian Jargon are of course from a much later period and there’s no reason to assume it had been used within that exact area for hundreds of years, and while the other argument does make a certain amount of sense, the most it can establish is that the Mississippians used a pidgin, and it does nothing to show why that pidgin was likely to have been the ancestor to the Mobilian Jargon of historical times.  Indeed, as Drechsel even admits at one point, it’s more likely that the Mississippians used several regional pidgins, of which the one most likely to be connected to Mobilian Jargon would be the one used in the southern area focused on Moundville in present-day Alabama.  This rephrasing of Drechsel’s hypothesis is more plausible than the idea that Mobilian Jargon was used throughout the Mississippian area, but it implicitly rejects his other argument, based on geographic range.  He may present more convincing evidence in his book, which I haven’t read, but based on this article I see no reason to conclude that Mobilian Jargon is likely to date from Mississippian times.

Drechsel’s more convincing argument, that Mobilian Jargon dates from precontact times rather than being a creation of the French colonization of Louisiana, may be indirectly supported by another chapter in this book.  In his discussion of leadership titles among natives of Spanish Florida, John H. Hann mentions that the Spanish considered the language of the Guale, apparently identical or closely related to the languages of the Tama, Yamasee, and Apalachicola, to be the most widely understood among the tribes of the area.  Since the Apalachicola spoke a Muskogean language related to Hitchiti, the Guale language described by the Spanish was probably Muskogean as well (though the language of the Guale themselves may well not have been), and may well have been the eastern dialect of an early form of Mobilian Jargon, which was of primarily Muskogean origin.  If this was indeed the case, it would explain why the language was so widely understood among peoples who may not have actually spoken related languages (many of the languages of this area are extremely poorly attested).  Use of a pidgin would have enabled easy communication among speakers of different languages, and if it really is behind these early Spanish reports that would be strong evidence for Drechsel’s contention that Mobilian Jargon was already established at the time of contact, since Spanish colonization was never nearly intense enough to produce the social upheavals likely to create a new lingua franca and the reports are close enough in time to the first clear attestations of Mobilian Jargon that it is the obvious candidate for an intercommunal pidgin in this area.

There’s a lot more in this short volume, most of which is likely to be interesting largely to those who already have some background in these subjects and incomprehensible to others.  For those who are interested, though, this is a nice little compendium of fairly recent scholarship on a fascinating topic.