Contents -- Illustrations -- Preface -- Introduction -- Part I The Prehistoric Background -- 1 Richard A. Krause - Trends and Trajectories in American Archaeology: Some Questions about the Mississippian Period in Southeastern Prehistory -- 2 James B. Griffin - Changing Concepts of the Prehistoric Mississippian Cultures of the Eastern United States -- 3 Bruce D. Smith - Mississippian Patterns of Subsistence and Settlement -- Part II The Age of Exploration -- 4 John H. Parry - Early European Penetration of Eastern North America -- 5 Jeffrey P. Brain - The Archaeology of the Hernando de SotoExpedition -- 6 Chester B. DePratter, Charles M. Hudson, and Marvin T. Smith - The Hernando de Soto Expedition: From Chiaha to Mabila -- 7 Charles H. Fairbanks - From Exploration to Settlement: Spanish Strategies for Colonization -- Part III Colonization and Conflict -- 8 Wilcomb E. Washburn - The Southeast in the Age of Conflict and Revolution -- 9 Eugene Lyon - Continuity in the Age of Conquest: The Establishment of Spanish Sovereignty in the Sixteenth Century -- 10 William S. Coker and Hazel P. Coker - The Siege of Mobile, 1780, in Maps -- 11 - Michael C. Scardaville - Approaches to the Study of Southeastern Borderlands -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Contributors -- Index.