Joara - Settlement

Settlement

Joara is thought to have been settled some time after AD 1000 by the Mississippian culture, which built an earthwork mound at the site. It was a regional chiefdom, established on the west bank of Upper Creek and within sight of Table Rock, a dominant geographical feature of the area. The Joara natives comprised the eastern extent of Mississippian Mound Builder culture, which was centered in the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys. By the time of the first European contact with Native Americans in the foothills of the southern Appalachians, Joara had already grown to be the largest Mississippian-culture settlement in present-day North Carolina. The town served as the political center of a regional chiefdom that controlled many of the surrounding native settlements.

Most contemporary scholars, following John Swanton, connect the various spellings of Joara with the Cheraw, a Siouan language-speaking people. The Catawba Nation are likely descendants of the natives at Joara.

Cofitachequi and the neighboring Coosa chiefdoms were developed by ancestral Muskogean-speaking groups, who apparently claimed other areas as tributary. The Creek are their descendants. The scholar T.H. Lewis at first associated the term Xualla with the modern Qualla Boundary and thought it was Cherokee, but most modern scholars no longer believe this, as noted above. Charles Hudson alone among modern scholars argues that Joara may be a Cherokee name; they were not moundbuilders, in any case.