The Search for Mabila: The Decisive Battle between Hernando de Soto and Chief Tascalusa

Knight advocates using a series of "trial fits" with existing geographic and archaeological data to locate Mabila - essentially testing multiple hypotheses with more field data until one emerges as the best fit. While many archaeologists have assumed that finds of sickles indicate ties to the agricultural de Luna colony, Waselkov cautions that sickles could have been used to collect fodder for horses on the De Soto expedition. The first paper, by Robbie Ethridge, Kathryn Braund, Lawrence Clayton, George Lankford, and Michael Murphy, provides a comparative analysis of the De Soto narratives.