Pensacola people

The Pensacola were a Native American people who lived in the western part of what is now the Florida Panhandle and eastern Alabama for centuries before first contact with Europeans until early in the 18th century. They spoke a Muskogean language. They are the source of the name of Pensacola Bay and the city of Pensacola. They lived in the area until the mid-18th century, but were thereafter assimilated into other groups.

The historical Pensacola people lived in part of a region once occupied by a group that archaeologists call the Pensacola culture, a regional variation of the Mississippian culture that lasted from 1100 to 1700 CE. The archaeological culture covers an area stretching from a transitional Pensacola/Fort Walton culture zone at Choctawhatchee Bay in Florida to the eastern side of the Mississippi River Delta near Biloxi, Mississippi, with the majority of its sites located along Mobile Bay in the Mobile-Tensaw River Delta. Sites for the culture stretched inland, north into the southern Tombigbee and Alabama River valleys, as far as the vicinity of Selma, Alabama. (The Fort Walton culture continued to exist in the Florida Panhandle to the east of the Pensacola area into the period of European colonization.)

Perhaps the best known Pensacola culture site is the Bottle Creek Indian Mounds site, a large site located on a low swampy island north of Mobile, Alabama. This site has at least eighteen platform mounds; five of which are arranged around a central plaza. Its main occupation was from 1250 to 1550. It was a ceremonial center for the Pensacola culture peoples, and a gateway to their society. This site seems like an unlikely place to find a ceremonial center because it is surrounded by swamps and is difficult to reach on foot. However, it would have been easy access by a dugout canoe, the main mode of transportation available to the people who built the Bottle Creek site.

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