Alabama Early History

First Early Inhabitants of Alabama

Early history examines the archaeological record that tells the story of the first inhabitants of Alabama. Learn about the history and culture of the first inhabitants, and what lessons it might teach us about the early history of Alabama.

Alabama First Early Inhabitants

• 10,000 BC - 7000 BC - The first inhabitants of the area we now call Alabama were of the Paleo-Indian culture, semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived in caves or in the open countryside around 10,000 years ago. (e.g. Russell Cave in Jackson County and the Stanfield-Worley bluff shelter in Colbert County).
• 7000 BC - 1000 BC - Archaic Period of Native American hunter-gatherer culture as Indians build temporary dwellings, add shellfish to their diets, and fashion spear throwers to hunt small game.
• 2500 BC - 100 BC - Gulf Formational Period of Indian culture with increasing sophistication in ceramic development with tempered pottery.
• 300 BC - 1000 AD - Woodland Period of permanent houses, embellished pottery, bows and arrows, and maize and squash cultivation.
• 700 AD - 1300 AD - Mississippian culture features ceremonial mounds (e.g. Moundville, in Hale County), ornate pottery, and sophisticated agriculture.

Groups of native people can be identified as belonging to one of the historic tribes of Alabama, including the groups who speak Muskogee, and those belonging to the Mississippian chiefdoms. These groups combined to become the Creek Confederacy. In similar fashion, other groups of tribes came together to create the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Cherokee tribes.

Agriculture was practiced by Indians such as the Creeks and Cherokee in the east, and the Choctaws and Chickasaws in the west when Spanish explorers arrived. The first known European contact with what would become Alabama occurred in 1519 when Alonso Alvarez de Pineda sailed in Mobile Bay.  Cabeza de Vaca (and possibly Pánfilo de Narvaez) visited Alabama in 1528, and the Spanish did not really explore the area for another two decades, when Hernando de Soto led an expedition into the region about 1540.

The first permanent European settlement in Alabama was founded by the French at Fort Louis de la Mobile in 1702. The British gained control of the area in 1763 by the Treaty of Paris, but had to cede almost all the Alabama region to the US and Spain after the American Revolution.

Between 1805 and 1806, the Choctaw tribes (in western Alabama) and the Chickasaw and Cherokee tribes (in northern Alabama) were forced to cede their land to white settlement. The Creek Indians attempted to ally themselves with other tribes from the North in resistance to white settlement, but were ultimately unsuccessful. As a result, most of the native people of Alabama were resettled in the Oklahoma territory.