This is thought to either reflect their active trading of flint for tools from local sources on their land in the eponymously named modern Avoyelles Parish or more likely as their status as middlemen in trading flint from Caddoan peoples to their north to the stone deficit Atakapa and Chitimacha peoples of the Gulf Coast.
[3][4] French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville misleadingly called the Avoyel petits Taensas in 1699.
The Avoyel likely experienced the same drastic decimation as Native American tribes, primarily due to newly introduced European infectious diseases to which they had no acquired immunity.
The Avoyel survivors were believed to have been absorbed by marriage into the neighboring Tunica, Ofo, and Biloxi peoples who had moved to the area sometime in the late 1780s or 1790s because of encroachment by Euro-Americans at their previous locations.
[9][11][12][13] Indian Agent John Sibley wrote in 1805 that the only surviving Avoyel were two or three women living along the Washita River.