Charles M. Hudson

He was a leading scholar on the history and culture of Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the present-day United States.

[1] Hudson published The Southeastern Indians (University of Tennessee Press, 1976), a comprehensive overview of the region's native peoples.

In 1984, Hudson and fellow researchers Marvin T. Smith and Chester DePratter mapped the route taken by de Soto's expedition by using written accounts of expedition members, and matching them with geographic features and the results of continuing excavations of archaeological evidence of Indian settlements.

Hudson and his colleagues argued that the sites of these settlements formed a chain across the Southeast that marked the path that would have been taken by the expedition.

One has to both represent the exotic world of the Southeastern chiefdoms and the European world-system that impinged upon them as "storms brewed in other men's lands"[5] and in time destroyed, dissolved, or enveloped by them.

If the Native peoples of the Americas are ever to be more than moral fodder for various ideologies—whether left, right, or postmodern—they must find their proper place in the social history of the modern world.