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Concept
Apalachee
Summary
The Apalachee were an Indigenous people of the Southeastern Woodlands, specifically an Indigenous people of Florida, who lived in the Florida Panhandle until the early 18th century. They lived between the Aucilla River and Ochlockonee River, at the head of Apalachee Bay, an area known as the Apalachee Province. They spoke a Muskogean language called Apalachee, which is now extinct.
The Apalachee occupied the site of Velda Mound starting about 1450 CE, but they had mostly abandoned it when Spanish started settlements in the 17th century. They first encountered Spanish explorers in 1528, when the Narváez expedition arrived. Their tribal enemies, European diseases, and European encroachment severely reduced their population.
Warfare from 1701 to 1704 devastated the Apalachee, and they abandoned their homelands by 1704, fleeing north to the Carolinas, Georgia, and Alabama.
The Apalachee language was a Muskogean language, about which little more is known. It went extinct in the late 18th century. The only surviving Apalachee document is a 1688 letter written by Apalachee chiefs to the Spanish king.
Ethnographer John Reed Swanton wrote that Apalachee may have come from the Hitchiti language term for "people on the other side" or the Choctaw language word apelachi meaning "a helper."
The Apalachee are thought to be part of Fort Walton Culture, a Florida culture influenced by the Mississippian culture.
The Apalachee were horticulturalists with stratified chiefdoms and sedentary towns and villages. Like many other Southeastern tribes, they have an alternating dual governmental system with a war chief and a peace chief. Leadership was hereditary and matrilinear.
At the time of Hernando de Soto's visit in 1539 and 1540, the Apalachee capital was Anhaica (present-day Tallahassee, Florida). The Apalachee lived in villages of various sizes, or on individual farmsteads of or so. Smaller settlements might have a single earthwork mound and a few houses. Larger towns (50 to 100 houses) were chiefdoms.
Official source
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