De Soto's 1539 siege of the Apalachee capital Anhikaha, found under Tallahassee

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Key facts

• Hernando de Soto's 1539 expedition landed in Tampa Bay with seven ships, 600 men, 237 horses and 200 pigs, carrying a directive from Queen Isabella to colonize La Florida; the expedition lasted three years and reached the Mississippi River
• Spanish chroniclers described the town of Uzita as having a tall earthen pyramid with a ruler's palace on top; de Soto had his furniture hauled up and lived there about a month
• The palace platform top was wide and flat, with room for a main palace and smaller buildings arranged around it, and the perimeter was enclosed by a tall palisade wall
• The Apalachee capital Anhikaha had about 200 houses both inside and outside its palisade, plus a public market, sweat baths, public meeting halls, canals irrigating cornfields and reservoirs inside the city; the Spanish said it was not unlike an average European city of the period
• Anhikaha had only one earthen pyramid, the one carrying the king's palace, while other towns in the kingdom had more and larger pyramids; the Spanish recorded this as an oddity
• The Spanish estimated about 100,000 people lived in the Apalachee kingdom across dozens of towns and small cities, many with their own pyramids and palisade walls, under a central leadership seated at Anhikaha
• De Soto obtained a meeting with the Apalachee king after ransoming a captured leader related to the king, then took the king hostage and enslaved the population, using Anhikaha as his winter camp for six months
• Archaeologists have identified Anhikaha beneath modern Tallahassee, roughly half a mile from the state capitol, with metal and other European artifacts from the de Soto expedition confirming the identification
• Lake Jackson Mounds, north of Tallahassee, is a larger Mississippian site with two plazas, seven earthen platforms and Mississippian iconography; archaeologists date its abandonment to before 1500 CE
• The video argues that because Lake Jackson Mounds was abandoned before 1500 CE, Anhikaha was likely a newly relocated capital moved from Lake Jackson a few decades before de Soto arrived, which could explain its single small pyramid

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