Charles M. Hudson

Charles Melvin Hudson, Jr. (1932 – 2013) was the Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History Emeritus at the University of Georgia, and a leading authority on the history and culture of Native Americans in the Southeastern United States.

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 the University of North Carolina at 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 thirty-five years, retiring in 2000 as Professor Emeritus of Anthropology & History. In his retirement he moved back to his native Kentucky, where he died on June 8, 2013.

In 1976, Hudson published The Southeastern Indians (University of Tennessee Press), 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.

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:

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