12 Facts About Joara

Joara was a large Native American settlement, a regional chiefdom of the Mississippian culture, located in what is Burke County, North Carolina, about 300 miles from the Atlantic coast in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Joara is notable as a significant archaeological and historic site, where Mississippian culture-era and European artifacts have been found, in addition to an earthwork platform mound and remains of a 16th-century Spanish fort.

The Joara chiefdom was the site of Fort San Juan, established by the Juan Pardo expedition as the earliest Spanish outpost in the interior of what is North Carolina.

Joara was abandoned long before English explorers arrived in the region in the 17th century, and the site became lost.

Joara is thought to have been settled some time after AD 1000 by people of the Mississippian culture era, who built an earthwork mound at the site.

Related searches

The Joara natives comprised the eastern extent of Mississippian culture, which was centered in the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys.

Joara renamed it Cuenca after his hometown of Cuenca, Spain.

Captain Pardo's narrative of his travels, settlement at Joara and founding of five other forts, written by his scribe Bandera, were discovered in the 1980s and translated into English for the first time.

Together with the archeological evidence at Joara, they have contributed to a significant reassessment of the history of Spanish colonization in the interior of North America.

Joara described a large town he called "Sara", in the mountains that "received from the Spaniards the name of Suala".

Joara said that the natives here mined cinnabar to make purple facepaint, and had cakes of salt.

Joara is particularly interesting for revealing the interaction between Native Americans and Spanish, who were relatively few in number and depended on the natives for food.