Name Charles Hudson | Role Author | |
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Books The Southeastern Indians, Knights of Spain - warriors o, The Juan Pardo expeditions, Conversations with the high pries, The Cow‑Hunter: A Novel | ||
Charles Melvin Hudson, Jr. (1932–2013) was an anthropologist, professor of anthropology and history at the University of Georgia, and a leading scholar on the history and culture of Native Americans in the Southeastern United States.
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Life
Hudson grew up on a farm in Owen County, Kentucky, then served in the U.S. Air Force during the Korean War. After the war, he used the G.I. Bill to attend the University of Kentucky, receiving a bachelor's degree in anthropology in 1958. He then pursued graduate studies in anthropology at theUniversity of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, earning an M.A. (1962) and a Ph.D. (1965). Upon earning his doctorate, he became a faculty member in the anthropology department at the University of Georgia, where he would spend the next 35 years, until his 2000 retirement, a professor of anthropology and history. After retiring, Hudson returned to Kentucky. He died there on June 8, 2013.
Scholarly work
Hudson published The Southeastern Indians (University of Tennessee Press, 1976), a comprehensive overview of the region's native peoples. He was perhaps best known for his extensive research of Hernando de Soto's 1539–1543 expedition across the Southeast. 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 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. [1].
His other works included Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun (University of Georgia Press, 1997), a detailed account of the de Soto expedition. In his retirement, he began writing historical novels.
A strong advocate of fostering close ties between the disciplines of anthropology and history, Hudson was one of the founders of the Southern Anthropological Society, serving as president of the organization in 1973-74. In 1993-94 he served as president of the American Society for Ethnohistory.
Influence
Hudson's work has had a major influence on subsequent scholars of American Indians in the Southeast, and he is frequently cited by various historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, including the following: