Much of the research into 16th Century goings-on in the South sheds light on Native residents first through the eyes of the Europeans that encountered them, instead of Native peoples themselves. 

An effort at the Lamar mounds in the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historic Park in Georgia seeks to broaden the current narrative. The Journal of Anthropological Archaeology carries the one of the fruits of the work of the scientists involved, which include SFFGS Associate Professor Eben Broadbent.

“Although certainly important for such research, there are several challenges — e.g., differential recovery techniques, depositional environments, and adoption of such goods — for relying on the recovery of such artifacts to indicate specific kinds of European-Indigenous Native American interactions…,” according to the article, in the journal’s Sept. 2026 edition. 

“Second, at times in our quest to identify the location of European routes, settlements, and their associated artifacts we have sometimes overemphasized the finding of things and places over the stories of Native towns and their landscape that existed during this time frame.”

For this study, the group looked at how the residents of the Lamar site reacted to de Soto by surveying, excavating and radiocarbon dating.

“We consider how these town histories may have structured the experiences that the people had with the (Hernando de) Soto entrada as it came through the Ocmulgee region,” according to the article. “Thus, our argument is that to understand institutional change in the region, we need to have comparable detailed town histories and chronologies that better resolve how these events effected change.”

The surveying is where Dr. Broadbent’s Spatial Ecology and Conservation (SPEC) Lab comes in.

“Using #GatorEye drone LiDAR, we mapped the Lamar site at ultra-high resolution, revealing previously undocumented archaeological features, including evidence of a possible earthlodge atop Mound A and new insights into the layout of one of the most important Lamar-period Indigenous towns in the Southeast,” Broadbent wrote in a social media post announcing the article.

“Combined with new radiocarbon dating, the study helps reconstruct centuries of Indigenous history in the Ocmulgee River Basin and places Native communities — not European expeditions — at the center of the story.”

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