Guale

The Guale were Indigenous people of the Georgia coast and Sea Islands, builders of Savannah and Irene phase Mississippian towns, their mounds and shell-ring villages such as the settlement on Ossabaw Island dating to the twelfth century. Jean Ribault's French expedition met them in 1562; Franciscans soon made their country a Spanish Florida mission province.

Juanillo's 1597 uprising killed five friars and brought brutal Spanish reprisals, though missions were rebuilt after 1600. Their language is now unattested and unclassified, vocabulary once called Muskogean proving to be Muscogee.

English-backed slave raids shattered the province: the Westo destroyed every Georgia mission between 1675 and 1684, and Spain abandoned the coast. Refugee Guale became the majority in the Upper Towns of the Yamasee confederacy, and after the 1715 Yamasee War survivors merged into the Florida missions and Lower Creeks; by 1733 too few remained to oppose Georgia's founding.