Coosa

The Coosa were a Muskogean-speaking people of the South Appalachian Mississippian culture, whose paramount chiefdom was centered on the Coosawattee River in northwestern Georgia. Their capital, with a plaza and three platform mounds, ruled eight villages and headed a confederation of seven or more smaller chiefdoms stretching some four hundred miles across northern Georgia, eastern Tennessee and Alabama, perhaps fifty thousand people.

Hernando de Soto passed through in 1540 and found fertile gardens and well-stocked towns; Spanish expeditions under Tristán de Luna (1560) and Juan Pardo (1566–1568) followed.

Old World diseases then emptied the countryside: by the late sixteenth century the core lands had been abandoned, and the survivors regrouped in fortified villages on the Coosa River in Alabama. The town of Coosa lived on as one of the four mother towns of the Muscogee Creek confederacy.