November 21, 2011
Who actually lived in the Southeastern Coastal Plain?
In this essay, Richard Thornton shares his linguistic findings which point to the ancestors of the Muscogean Peoples:
Readers will be amazed by the translations of the indigenous words recorded by the European explorers of the Lower Southeast. It is just mind-boggling how much critical information the researchers of the de Soto and Pardo Expeditions missed by not translating the indigenous words. These translations present a starkly different perspective on the Southeast’s pre-European history than what one usually reads in literature. Among other things you will learn that the official titles of some elected leaders of the Muskogee-Creek Nation were used by the Mayas 1500 years ago! Your mind will be especially blown, when you learn the Mesoamerican origin of the name of the “Chiliqui” People encountered by Hernando de Soto.
There is a broad swath of level, sometimes swampy landscape across the Southeast, created by the relatively recent subsidence of the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean. It has not been thoroughly surveyed by archaeologists and is often concealed by either jungle-like vegetation or swamps. Ongoing archival, architectural and linguistic research of this region suggests that its past was far more complex and cosmopolitan than long believed by the mainstream of the archaeology profession. Essentially, what we have found is that Itsati-Creek language is an offshoot of Alabama (proto-Muskogean) with an extensive Mesoamerican vocabulary related to agricultural, political and architectural activities.
The director of a museum in Georgia emailed me with a request for a chart that would succinctly describe the names, locations and chronology of indigenous ethnic groups that formerly occupied the state. I wrote back that I couldn’t do it. The more research I do, the less I know that I know for certain. Yes, I could draw him pretty pictures on the computer; build him a model that would amaze museum visitors; or our History Revealed Media team could make a documentary film about a particular archaeological site. However, to assign ethnic labels to all archaeological sites in Georgia right now is an impossible task. There seems to be little relationship between the federally recognized tribes on official National Park Service maps, and the linguistic evidence popping up in colonial archives.
If it was only so simple
Seven years ago, six members of the Muscogee-Creek National Council approached me with a request to write a heavily illustrated book that comprehensively described the history of the Muskogean peoples, prior to European Contact. They were highly dissatisfied with a series of late 20th century archaeology books published by Southeastern universities that discussed numerous ancestral Creek town sites, but whose authors never communicated with Creek scholars, before interpreting Creek culture.
I started out the task of illustrating Creek history as if it was yet another architecture project. I would comprehensively research the published body of knowledge produced by the archaeology profession, then convert their two dimensional facts into three dimensional computer models. If it was only so simple!
Many of the archaeological studies seemed so focused on the minute details that they missed the big picture – especially in regard to architecture and community plans. There also seemed to very little thought to what was going regionally or inter-regionally during any particular era. The forms and orientations of structures were sending messages that flew right over the heads of archaeological teams. Few archaeologists asked what was the climate like at this place in any given decade? What was happening in other parts of the Americas at this time . . . and so on.
One day in 2006 I was going through a box of memories from Mexico. I stumbled across a photo of my first love in her sexy yellow mini-skirt; standing in front of a Totonac house in northern Vera Cruz State. The image reminded me that traditional Totonac houses are identical in construction to the Muskogean post-ditch houses found throughout the Lower Southeast at 1000+ year old archaeological sites.
Out of curiosity, I accessed the UNAM website that translates Spanish words into a legion of indigenous Mexican languages. I typed in “casa” and double-clicked “Totonaca.” Instantaneously, the screen displayed “chiki.” Holy Moses! . . . well, I didn’t exactly say “Moses.” <wink>
The Totonac word for house was the same as the Itsati, Seminole and Eastern Creek word for house. I had discovered the tip of a linguistic “smoking gun” that connected Mesoamerica to Muskogean culture. Since then, with a minimum amount of effort, several of us in POOF have discovered dozens of Totonac and Maya words and town names within the Muskogean languages. Many have the same meanings and the same pronunciations. I am certain that professional linguists with sophisticated softwares could carry the research much, much farther, but haven’t, to date.
Other words have applied meanings. For example, the Maya word for warm is “choko.” Choko in Choctaw and Georgia Muskogee is the name of a winter house. It is now “chuko” in Oklahoma. Heneha is the official title of the Second Chief of the Muscogee-Creek Nation. Hene-ahau was the title during Classic Maya times for the close relatives of the Great Sun, who represented his authority in his absence.
During the past 150 years, how many anthropologists, Pre-Columbian scholars and linguists in North America, Mexico and Europe have discovered this direct, obvious connection between Mesoamerican and Muskogean cultures? Zero . . . Not one person, among the hundreds of thousands that practiced these professions, had bothered to look up the same word in two dictionaries.
The evidence at hand
There is no English “b” sound in the Creek languages. However, English and Cherokee speakers often wrote a Muskogean “p” as a “b “.
A Muskogean “v” sound can be either “? or roughly an “äw” sound. The chroniclers of de Soto and Pardo usually interpreted a Muskogean “v” as a Castilian “u.”
Muskogean “t” sounds are generally written as a “d” in English and Cherokee.
In Itsati (Hitchiti) an internal “s” was actually a “jzh” sound – almost exactly like several Mesoamerican languages.
Apparently, the Itsati’s pronounced a “th” sound like Mesoamericans did, but today in Oklahoma, Muskogee Creeks don’t pronounce it so the “th” has been removed from the spelling of words.
The Spanish generally interpreted an aspirated Muskogean “e” or “I” as an “a.”
An Itsati “c” is pronounced something like a Mesoamerican “tch” sound, as in Tenochtitlan.
It is obvious that much more archaeological research is needed in the Southeastern Coastal Plain before what happened in the past can be described with any certainty. The remainder of this article will discuss in outline form some of the more important linguistic, architectural or archival evidence. It is hoped that my essay will inspire students to THINK rather than regurgitate . . . and anthropology professors to develop research proposals that will attempt to answer many of the questions raised by linguistics. The Section 106 archaeological surveys are just not producing the basic research that is possible in fully funded academically-sponsored archaeological investigations.
1. Biloxi – This was a small village located near the Mississippi town of the same name that supposedly spoke an aberrant Siouan dialect. This tribe by its, Muskogean name of Polachikola, appears as the main ethnic group that occupied the Yamassee Region of the Lower Savannah River Basin prior to the Yamasee War (1715-1717.). They appear to be one and the same as the Yamasee. (See Yamasee.) Apparently, the original territory of the Biloxi was southeastern Georgia, while the village in Mississippi was a small colony.
2. Chiliqui – This is the Totonac adjective meaning “primitive, bucolic or stupid.” De Soto encountered a province of primitive people, “who went naked and obtained substance by digging up roots” whom his Muskogean guides called either the Chiliqui or the Chilaqui (different spellings by different chroniclers.) The name could not be a case of a Totonac guide being among the Spanish. The modern Muskogee Creek word for a foreigner or barbarian is “chiliya!”
3. Am Ixel – This is a Chontal Maya word, which means Place of the Goddess, Ixel. She was the goddess of fertility in Classic Maya times and also the goddess of the new moon in Post Classic times. Both the coastal plain of Tamaulipas State and the Gulf Coast between Mobile, AL and Cedar Key, FL were recorded by the Spanish as being named Amichel.
4. Chontal Maya - Ixel was the favorite goddess of the Chontal Maya, who were considered illiterate barbarians by the Classic Period Maya. The homeland of the Chontal Maya in Tabasco State (Chontalpa) looks exactly like the barriers islands and marshes of Georgia and South Carolina. Chontal Maya towns were usually built on islands within tidal marshes or inland swamps, but near navigable rivers.
The Chontal Maya built crescent or oval shaped mounds as bases for Am Ixel temples. The principal temple at the Ortona site near Lake Okeechobee, FL was set on a crescent-shaped mound.
On level land, their towns were laid out exactly like proto-Creek towns in the Southeast. The Chontal Maya generally did not build rock-faced pyramids. As the premier merchants and sailors, they traversed the known Mesoamerican world. When setting up a new trade network, they would establish fortified trading posts on passes in the highlands or on plateaus over-looking piedmont rivers or on islands in coastal marshes.
The sea-going merchants constructed plank-built canoes, boats and sail boats that had distinctive up-turned prows and keels that mimicked a serpent. The winged serpent motif was often painted on the sides of their sea craft. Their larger boats with sails were the same size and construction as Viking l?ngbåt’s. Their larger boats were quite capable of crossing the Gulf of Mexico with a heavy cargo of commodities or slaves.
There were several Chontal Maya dialects that developed over the 1000+ years of their nautical experience. Northern dialects mixed Itza Maya with either Totonac or Nahuatl. Southern dialects mixed Itza Maya with Zoque, Yucateca and other Maya dialects.
5. Mesoamerican suffixes and prefixes:
· “le” suffix – This was a pre-Nahuatl locative suffix spoken on the coastal plain of Tamaulipas State AND on the coast of Georgia. In both regions, it means “people or ethnic group.” Examples of its use in the Southeast include Wahale (Guale) which means Southern People in Coastal Itsati and Tokahle, which means “Freckled People” in both coastal Itsati AND contemporary Muskogee. The Spanish called the Tokahle, the Tokee. An example of this suffix on the Gulf Coast would be Mapile (Mabila) which meant “Trader People” in the northern Chontal Maya dialect.
· “tli” suffix – This is a Nahuatl and Totonac locative suffix meaning either an ethnic group or the territory of an ethnic group. A good example of the “tli” suffix in the Southeast is the Tamv-tli (Tamatli) who inhabited the upper Altamaha River basin, a section of the Keowee River Valley in South Carolina and the valley between Murphy, NC and Andrews, NC Highland dialects of Itsati shortened the “tli” to “ti”. The use of the “ti” suffix is endemic in the Southern Highlands.
· “pas, pan, pa” suffixes - Pan is the Nahuatl suffix meaning “place of or territory of.” The Chontal Maya altered that to pas or pa. The “pa” suffix can be seen is several town names mentioned by early Spanish explorers, but by the time of the arrival of English explorers, “po” was more common along the South Carolina coast. Early South Carolina settlers generally wrote down the “po” sounds as a “bo” sound.
There is a pure example of a commonplace Creek word that is pure Chontal Maya. The Itsati chokopa was the rotunda in which all members of a community could meet or dance. It means “warm place.” In Oklahoma Muskogee this word has become “chukofa.”
An example of the “pa” suffix in South Carolina is the actual name of the Catawba Indians. It was Kvtvpa, which means “Place of the Crown” or “people with crowns.” in a dialect of Itsati spoken in South Carolina. Catawba’s flattened the heads of high born babies like some Mesoamerican cultures. The warriors wore their hair in crown like buns on top of their head in order to appear taller.
An excellent example of the “po” suffix proving its equivalence to “pa” is the real name of the Cusabo. They called themselves, the Kvsapo, which means “Territory of the Kusa” in hybrid Itsati-Chontal Maya.
· “ha” suffix – This suffix means “water” or “river” in Chontal Maya and is pronounced like “haw.” It is found in several geographical place names in South Carolina and eastern Georgia – with the same meaning.
· “ahv” suffix - This is Itza Maya for “lord” or someone from the nobility. A combination of a Chontal Maya prefix, a Totonac word and an Itza Maya suffix can be seen in the Altamaha River. In Chontal Maya – or the Tamatli language of southeast Georgia that would be Al – Tamv –ahv, which means, “Place of the Tamau Lord.”
· “Am or al” prefix – Certain dialects of the Chontal Maya Trade Jargon used either “Am” or “al” as locative prefixes. They seem to apply only to large geographic regions, whereas the suffixes refer to town-scaled locations or smaller.
6. Tamv – This is Totonac root verb meaning to buy or trade. Of course, Tama was one of the Coastal Plain towns visited by de Soto and other Spanish explorers during the 1500s and early 1600s.
7. Tamaulipas – Mexican scholars have struggled for three centuries to translate the name of this state. This word, along with Am Ixel, pre-dates the invasion of Chichimec (Nahuatl) barbarians around 1250 AD. How ironic that the Itsati language in the Southeastern United States translates the word perfectly. It means “Merchant – people – territory of. The “Merchant People” had to get the H out of Dodge City when the Chichimecas came roaring down out of the mountains around 1250 AD. Funny thing, all of a sudden we see major changes, new towns, etc. in the Southeast around 1250 AD.
8. Tamale – This means “Merchant People” in the language of coastal Tamaulipas pre-1250 AD. Son of a gun . . . it is also the name of a Spanish mission in northern Florida that served a congregation recently kicked out of southern Georgia.
9. Tomahitans – This was a mound-building ethnic group in extreme southwestern Virginia, who took the midnight train to Georgia in the early 1700s, to be back among their kin. Virginia anthropologists have long assumed that the Tomahitans were Algonquian, but that name is not what they called themselves. They called themselves, the Tamahi-ti. Tamahi is the Totonac word for merchant or vender. Add the “ti” Itsati suffix and you get a meaning of “Merchant People.”
10. Yama – This is the Creek name of the Mobilian Trade Jargon. In Totonac, “yama” means “clearing,” as in a clearing in the jungle for practicing slash and burn agriculture. In many parts of the Southeastern Coastal Plain, the aboriginal vegetation resembles Central American jungles. The soil is sandy and easy to cultivate with a hoe, but not very fertile – except in Alabama’s Black Belt. It makes perfect sense that Native peoples in this region would have practiced slash and burn agriculture and transient villages, while maintaining regional capitals with permanent public structures.
11. Yamasee – This means either “off spring of the Yama people” or alternatively “people who practice slash and burn agriculture.
12. Mabila – This was the Spanish spelling of a fortified town in Alabama’s Gulf Coastal Plain where a great battle took place. Knowing how the Castilian chroniclers interpreted Muskogean sounds, the actual spelling of the town in English-Creek phonetics would be Mapile. Mapi’ means to buy or trade in Totonac. Mapile in the pre-1250 AD language of Tamaulipas would mean “Merchant People.” Bottle Creek Mounds is located on an island in a swamp near the Mobile River. It was obviously a major, capital town, not the fortified outpost upstream mentioned by the de Soto Chronicles. However, its founding has been radiocarbon dated to be around 1250 AD – the exact time when the Totonac capital of Tajin fell to Chichimec barbarians.
13. Ocute – This is a town near the Fall Line in central Georgia that was visited by de Soto in the spring of 1540. It was the capital of an ethnic group and major branch of the Creeks, now better known as the Oconee. Oconee is the Anglicized form of the Itsati (Hitchiti-Creek) word Okvni, which means "born from water" or "living on water." It is pronounced “?-käu-n?.” This branch of the Muskogeans is better known for the name given them by the chroniclers of the Hernando de Soto Expedition in 1540, Ocute - which is the Spanish version of the Itsati word Okvte. Okvte means "Water People" and pronounced, “?-käu-t?.”
According to Oconee tradition, their original homeland was in the Okefenokee Swamp of southeastern Georgia. In fact, a branch of the Oconee still lived in this vast expanse of water during the 1600s, when it was under the domain of Spain. They are generally labeled “Timucua” on maps prepared in Florida, but obviously they were not ethnic Arawaks. The Oconee Creeks also once occupied towns and several villages in present-day northeastern Georgia, northwestern South Carolina and in the Great Smoky Mountains. Their presence in the Great Smoky Mountains is remembered by the name of the Oconaluftee River, which in the Itsati-Creek language means "separated Oconee people." The river’s name has no meaning in Cherokee, and in fact, until recent decades the locals used a Cherokee name for the river.
14. Okefenokee Swamp - In the 1970s the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service commissioned an archaeological survey of the Okefenokee Swamp. The consulting archaeologist found a minimum of 74 mounds WITHIN the boundaries of the national refuge. He estimated that at least a dozen more mounds lay just outside the park’s boundaries. The consultant only did some limited surface collections. He found a wide range of pottery styles during the effort.
15. Sweetwater Creek petroglyph – Exactly a hundred years ago, an approximately four foot high stela was found within a hilltop 
shrine overlooking the Chattahoochee River southwest of Atlanta. The inscribed design looked nothing like the art of the Muskogeans. It has been on display much of the time since then – now at Sweetwater Creek State Park. No one bothered to study the petroglyph seriously until I sent photos to several members of the American Petroglyphic Society for an article in the National Examiner. Within a couple of hours, several members from Puerto Rico matched it with a very common petroglyph found in Puerto Rico. In particular, it was almost identical to rock carvings near Arecibo and Toa, PR. Ot was definitely Taino art.
16. Toa – This was a town visited by de Soto in the Coastal Plain of Georgia in the spring of 1540. The province around Toa was named Toasi. Toa is the Taino word for a stone grill used to bake cassava bread, and also the name of a major Taino (Arawak) town on the northern coast of Puerto Rico.
17. Tawasee – This is the Anglicized name of a province in the vicinity of present day Birmingham, AL during the 1700s. It was absorbed by the Creek Confederacy after the French & Indian War. A man from Tawasee lived among British colonists for awhile. Many of the words he spoke were written down. He spoke a hybrid language that was Taino Arawak, with some influence from Muskogee-Creek. Tawasee is awfully close to Taosi – which means “offspring or satellite town of Toa.
18. Itsa-ti – This is what a major branch of the Creek Indians called themselves. It is also what the Cherokees called them. The word is pronounced approximately, ?t-zjh?-t?, but has been anglicized to Hitchiti. In their language, it means Itsa-people. The pronunciation of Itsa is about the same as the Maya pronunciation of Itza. The Itza got their name from their word for maize (Indian corn) which is Ixi’m.
19. Apalachee - Florida Indians living north of Tampa Bay told survivors of the Narvaez Expedition that living many days journey north of them was a very advanced and wealthy people named the Apalachee, who gathered gold from streams. Several years later, Hernando de Soto came upon a village near the edge of a province in the Florida Panhandle named Apalachin. He therefore labeled the whole province Apalachee, but that is not what they called themselves.
As de Soto was leaving this province in the spring of 1540 he asked them if their was any province where gold could be found. They told him that far to the north in the mountains lived the Apalachee. The capital of the Apalachee was named Yupaha. In the streams of this province, one could find an abundance of gold nuggets. In 1562 French Huguenots journeyed to the Apalachee province in the mountains. They found an abundance of gold in the mountain streams and named the mountains, Les Apalachiens.
Apala is the Itsati word for lamp or torch. It is now used for a flashlight. Apalachi would mean torch-bearers or people who bring light. Many scenes on Maya murals portray nobles carrying scepters shaped like torches. The art of Etalwa (Etowah Mounds) portrays leaders carrying torch-shaped scepters identical in form to the Maya ones.
20. Yupaha – The chroniclers of de Soto seem not to mention Yupaha after leaving the Florida Panhandle, but they unknowingly do. After leaving Kusa, the de Soto Expedition passes through Talwa Mochase (Town New) Itaba (Alabama language for a border crossing) and then stays in Ubahali. Ubahali is in English-Creek phonetics, Yupaha-le! That word means “People of the Horned Lord.” That very well could have been the name of the city of Cahokia. Archaeologists have found circumstantial evidence that a powerful “horned lord” initiated the sudden explosion of Cahokia around 1050 AD. Serious mound-building began in the Southern Highlands just about the time that Cahokia was abandoned.
Richard Thornton, Editor
Architect & City Planner
