Guale

Guale was a historic Native American chiefdom of Mississippian culture peoples located along the coast of present-day Georgia and the Sea Islands.

The Guale are believed to have been a Mississippian culture group that had a chiefdom along what is now the Georgia coast in the early period of Spanish exploration.

[1] Historical references note that the Jesuit Brother Domingo Agustín Váez recorded Guale grammar in 1569, but the documents have not been found.

[2] Archaeological studies indicate that the precursors of the historically known Guale lived along the Georgia coast and Sea Islands, from at least 1150 AD.

While the prehistoric ancestors to the Guale shared many characteristics with regional neighbors, they left unique archaeological features that distinguished the "proto-Guale" people from other groups.

They built Mississippian-type platform mounds, major earthworks requiring the organized labor of many people, and using highly skilled soil and engineering knowledge.

[4] French explorers under Jean Ribault contacted the Guale, whom they called the Oade after their chief, during their voyage to the Atlantic coast of North America in 1562.

The Guale maintained good relations with the ephemeral French settlement known as Charlesfort on Parris Island in what is now South Carolina.

Spencer Larsen and Christopher Ruff concluded this based on their analysis of the second moments of area on humerus and femur bones.

Between 1675 and 1684, the Westo tribe, supported by English colonists in the colonies of Carolina and Virginia, destroyed all Spanish missions in Georgia.

[10] Around or before 1684, one small group of Yamasee-Guale refugees, led by Chief Altamaha, moved north to the mouth of the Savannah River.

That year, a Scottish colony called Stuarts Town was founded in South Carolina on Port Royal Sound near the Savannah River.

In late 1684, armed with Scots firearms, these Indians raided Timucua Province, devastating the mission Santa Catalina de Afuyca.

The "Yamasee" who migrated in 1685 to the Port Royal area were rebuilding the old La Tama chiefdom, but they also included numerous Guale, as well as other Indians of mostly Muskogean stock.

The Lower Towns were populated mainly by La Tama Indians and included Altamaha (after the chief who lived there), Ocute, and Chechesee (Ichisi).

[12] In 1702, when Carolina Governor James Moore led an invasion into Spanish Florida, his men destroyed the few "refugee missions" in Guale.