Natchez Class and Rank Reconsidered

colonial administrators recorded the features of Natchez social life. In 1731 a war with the French led to the surrender and sale into slavery of one sector of the tribe and the dispersal of the remainder, who later were assimilated into the Creek confederacy. In writing the first modern ethnographic reconstruction of Natchez society and culture, Swanton (1911) had to rely upon somewhat fragmentary accounts of the French, principally those of Pénicaut, Du Pratz, Dumont, and Charlevoix (notes on early contacts are supplied in Appendix 2). The Natchez are the best described ethnographic example of the Temple Mound cultures of the Lower Mississippi valley, whose archeological record dates back to about 700 A.D. 1 As such, they provide the most striking instance of a stratified social system in aboriginal North America. The historical Natchez villages were scattered along St. Catherine’s Creek, which empties westward into the Mississippi River below the present city of Natchez, Mississippi. They comprised a population, in 1700, of about 3,500 persons in nine villages (Swanton 1911: 39-44). Over this population ruled