Dennis Blanton has produced a wonderful volume on excavations at the Glass site, a sixteenth-century Native American village with an abundance of European trade goods, located in southern Georgia. The book is written for a broad audience, although footnotes provide much scholarly detail of interest and importance to archaeologists and historians. It should be noted that Blanton has also produced a series of technical reports through the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta that provide more detail for a professional audience, but the present volume provides an exciting look at Blanton's fieldwork, changing interpretations, changing methodology, and exciting discoveries. It is well written in a first-person style that details Blanton's thought processes as the excavations proceeded over the course of several field seasons. This volume is the kind of work that more professional archaeologists should be writing to reach the public that supports our research. I believe that Blanton's report will become a model for popularizing archaeology and therefore should be read by a much broader audience than simply people interested in the archaeology of early contact between Europeans and Native Americans in the American South.

That being said, I do have some reservations about Blanton's interpretations and conclusions. Although he considers other explanations for the presence of European objects, he settles on the interpretation that the Glass site was visited by Hernando de Soto in 1540. In contrast to the Soto route proposed by Charles Hudson (Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms, 1997), Blanton suggests a different route. He makes a strong case for the Glass site being the capital of a province located on the lower Ocmulgee River. He argues that this province is Ichisi, mentioned in the chronicles of the Hernando de Soto expedition. If Glass is the provincial capital as Blanton says, the Glass site represents the town of Ichisi. Soto's secretary, Rodrigo Ranjel, states in his account of the Soto entrada that the Spaniards placed a cross on the mound at Ichisi. The only evidence of a mound at Glass is a layer of fill that seals in the temple structure. This structure has numerous sixteenth-century European artifacts on its floor sealed under the fill, and thus the “mound” postdates contact and could not have been seen by Ranjel.

Blanton argues that Glass and the surrounding province are exactly the kind of place that would attract Soto (pp. 143, 158). I am not convinced. Blanton states that Glass is the capital of the province, which otherwise consists of dispersed farmsteads. Blanton's population estimate for Glass is only 113–257 inhabitants (p. 127). The entire province must have been quite small, and it would seem to have been incapable of supporting Soto's army of 600 men, their horses, and a herd of pigs. Sites on the Fall Line (the geographic border between the Coastal Plain and Piedmont physiographic provinces) in the Soto route reconstruction of Charles Hudson are much larger and seem to be better candidates for places Soto would have wanted to travel to find food and wealth.

Elsewhere it has been argued that the context of the European artifacts at Glass is unusual and may not indicate direct contact with Europeans. The most likely mechanism for the acquisition of these items is scavenging of settlements in coastal South Carolina associated with Lucas Vázquez Ayllón (1521–1526; see, for example, the chapter by Marvin T. Smith and David J. Hally in Clay Mathers's forthcoming edited volume, Modeling Entradas: Sixteenth-Century Assemblages in North America, in press from the University Press of Florida).

Mark Williams (cited at p. 205n18) argues that this lower Ocmulgee province represents a group of people who migrated from the Oconee Valley in the mid-sixteenth century. Williams argues that they were attracted to move south to be near the Spanish settlements on the coast after 1565. Conversely, perhaps their movement was the result of disruption following the Soto expedition of 1540. Either way, they may have brought along European-derived items acquired from the Soto expedition while living in the Oconee Valley, an area that figures prominently in the Hudson Soto route reconstruction.

Blanton's careful excavations and excellent reporting bring attention to this important site. He proposes an alternative Soto route that differs from the Hudson route (which is different from the route proposed by John Swanton during the early to mid-twentieth century). Blanton's proposed route is carefully thought out, but as he notes, it requires finding additional archaeological sites in specific areas of the Oconee Valley. Therefore, his route is very testable. Blanton's fine work should stimulate further research, and I look forward to the continuation of the debate.