Arrival and Emplacement

This chapter outlines how emplacement was an important complement to displacement as a Native American adaption to continuing incursions of colonial powers. As with displacement, several key strategies of emplacement, or socially producing place, are explored. These include coalescence and colonization. As the late 1600s and 1700s progressed, the ongoing patterns of displacement and emplacement lent the southeastern landscape an increasingly fractal quality. Towns themselves may have incorporated distinct enclaves of newcomers, while nominal culture regions could contain discrete settlements of migrants forced out of shatter zones. By the mid- to late 1700s, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Catawbas, Creeks, and other surviving Native American communities of the Southeast were all multidimensional coalescent entities. In addition, the Franciscan mission system in the Spanish colony of La Florida is presented as a distinct trajectory of emplacement in the Southeast.