Today, only various place names are left to remind us that this was once the land of a significant people. Compared with today’s standards, they lived a simple life. Yet theirs was a sophisticated and civilized society.

To imagine what the area around Savannah looked like during the time of the Indians, all it takes is a drive out to Tybee Island. On both sides of the causeway lie extensive marshlands — open expanses punctuated by islands thick with palmetto and myrtle — while overhead the graceful heron wings slowly across the sky. This is an ancient, aboriginal setting largely unchanged from the time when the people called the Guale (pronounced “Wallie”) fished in these waters and hunted on the lands.

Before the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500s, it is estimated that the Guale (the word perhaps means “south”) numbered around 4,000 people who lived in some 50 villages between the Savannah River and St. Catherine’s Island. Muskogean linguistically, each tribal unit was headed by a chief called a mico. The names of their main villages are recognizable place names today — Ossabaw, Sapelo and Tullafinny — and they were likely the ones who gave the island at the mouth of the Savannah River the name Tybee, loosely meaning “salt.”

The coastal people were described by early Europeans as “handsome,” with strong, proud faces and long black hair often worn twisted on top of their heads with feathers and shells. They were in superb physical shape, with both men and women capable of running miles without fatigue.

Villages were usually situated along a creek or watercourse, the houses arranged around the larger dwelling of the mico, which also served as a state house where tribal decisions were made. These houses were usually made of bark, Spanish moss and palmetto fronds, although one Spanish explorer in the 1520s noted that in one Indian village he saw a building with walls made of “a mortar which they make of oyster shells.” While the Spanish gave it the name “tabby,” this points to the Indians as the originators of this common method of construction used in early coastal Georgia.

Superb hunters and fishermen, they also farmed plots where they grew melons, beans and corn. Another staple of their diet was shellfish, and, again, it is to the early coastal people that we attribute the unique entertainment called the oyster roast. In 1657, Spanish explorer Pedro Mendendez de Aviles visited an Indian village preparing for such a feast, writing, “They lighted great fires [and] brought many shellfish. … A great multitude of Indians came that night … laden with corn, cooked and roasted fish, oysters and many acorns.”

One curious remnant of these feasts are the formations called shell rings, circular structures composed entirely of shell refuse (oyster, clam and conch) that once dotted the coast from North Carolina to Florida. While some believe these were merely refuse dumps, others feel that because of their uniform construction they were purposely created for ceremonial use. Or, perhaps like a Stonehenge in miniature, designed for astronomical observations.

This is highly possible. With religious beliefs derived from nature, rituals often revolved around the moon and sun. Their religion was generally pantheistic, and, like the ancient Greeks and Romans, they worshipped many gods. Yet they also believed in a supreme being who put all creatures on the earth. Plants and animals were part of a natural order, there for people to use but never to abuse. They also gave thanks to the spirit of a plant or animal whenever it was necessary to take its life for sustenance.

Every piece of an animal was put to some practical use. Skins provided clothing and bed coverings. Bones became arrowpoints or scraping utensils. Sinew was woven into a type of rope and thread for sewing. Even seashells had sundry uses, and a conch attached to a long stick made a useful hoe.

They cooked their meat over an open fire, a term that came to be known through the Spanish as “barbacoa,” or, as we know it today, barbecue. They also artfully constructed earthenware vessels from clay to stew meats and vegetables, and they decorated this pottery with various swirls, diamonds and circles.

When naturalist William Bartram explored Tybee Island in 1773, he wrote of finding in a shell ring “fragments of earthen vessels … curiously wrought all over the outside, representing basket work, and was undoubtedly esteemed a very ingenious performance, by the people, at the age of its construction.”

When Oglethorpe landed on the Savannah River bluff and was met by Tomochichi, he was told that the tribe had only recently returned to the land of their ancestors.

Where Tomochichi’s people had been, and for how long, remains a mystery even today. However, it is likely that the ancestors to whom he was referring were the Guale who left their coastal homeland during several periods in the late 1500s and early 1600s.

Unraveling this mystery begins with the arrival of the Spaniards at St. Augustine in the 1500s. Spanish Jesuits immediately began to set up missions in Guale country, where they attempted to convert these “savages” to Christianity. While some accepted the friars’ teachings (one missionary even created a written dictionary of the Guale language), others did not. As one Jesuit missionary wrote, “They have been accustomed to live in (their) manner for many thousands of years and to try to get them away from it looks to them equal to death.”

In the words of a Guale speaker of the time, “They deprive us of all happiness which our ancestors enjoyed with the hope they will give us heaven.” In 1597, the Guale finally revolted against the Spaniards living amongst them, with only one friar remaining alive to tell the tale.

The Spaniards retaliated with brutal efficiency, burning almost every Guale village and destroying all their crops. Forced to accept Spanish domination, a large number of Guale people moved south to islands near St. Augustine. Others moved elsewhere — inland with the Creeks or northward to the Port Royal coastal region, where they assimilated with other tribes. It is probable that one of these latter groups included Tomochichi’s ancestors, perhaps affiliating with the tribe called the Yamassee.

In the ensuing years, the coastal lands of the Guale remained virtually empty of permanent inhabitants. However, the Savannah River, particularly upstream and further away from the Spaniards, was still home to numerous tribal groups. One such tribe, the Westo, lived near present-day Augusta. The Savannah River is referred to in some early writings as “Westo-bou” — the “-bou” at the end of a word indicating a course of water.

Interestingly, the word “Savannah” does not come from a Georgia tribe but from a group of Shawnee also known as “Savanoa.” In the mid-1600s a large group of Shawnee from the Susquehanna River valley in Pennsylvania and Delaware migrated south to present-day Georgia. While they remained in Georgia long enough that the river was given their name, by the early 1700s they had migrated westward to the Ohio River.

The arrival of the English to South Carolina in 1670 began the ultimate downfall of the remaining Guale and other coastal tribes. In some cases, smallpox and other European diseases decimated entire villages. Equally insidious was the introduction of rum. There had been no use of fermented liquors previously in the Native American lifestyle, and the effects of drunkenness were tragic. Finally, in 1713, the Yemassee War, a brutal three-year conflict, killed untold numbers. By 1715, the total population of the Guale people numbered only 1,200 people, most of whom lived in Florida.

Yet even today, occasional remnants of this lost culture can be found — a pottery shard unearthed while working a garden; the occasional arrowpoint — that remind us that once, in the not so distant past, the land we live upon was inhabited by an earlier people.

They were not mighty warriors nor were they especially powerful within the various Native American nations of the Southeast. They were, however, a resourceful people who had for centuries lived in harmony with the land and who valued the earth as a gift to be honored and treated with respect.