When Hernando de Soto’s band of adventurers crossed the southeastern United States in 1539–43, they witnessed the living, vibrant cultures of moundbuilding American Indians (see fig. 5 in the essay by Garrick Bailey). Unlike settlers in the nineteenth century, these Spaniards had no need to invent a mythical race of moundbuilders to account for the earthen monuments they beheld, because the leaders of the Natchez Indians they met in Mississippi lived in mound-top lodges and honored their …