Conquistadors, excavators, or rodents: What damaged the king site skeletons?

It has been claimed that many Native American skeletons from the King site in Georgia show evidence of wounds from sharp-edged metal weapons that were wielded by members of the sixteenth-century de Solo expedition (Blakely an d Mathews 1990). The supposed massacre of these villagers has caught the at tention of the public and scholars alike. But we failed to find any evidenc e of damage caused by sixteenth-century Spanish weapons in our examination of the King site skeletons. Our finding-there is no evidence for a massacre -eliminates a major discrepancy between historical and archaeological infor mation used in reconstructions of the de Soto route.