CE) of the Tensas Basin saw the increasing spread of Mississippian influences diffusing southward from Arkansas and northwestern Mississippi. The Jordan Mounds site on a relict channel of the Arkansas River in northeastern Louisianas Morehouse Parish was constructed during the protohistoric period between 1540 and 1685. The builders were an intrusive group in the area, Mississippianized peoples who were possibly refugees from the Mississippi River area to the east and were escaping the collapse of their society brought about by the aftereffects of European contact. By the late 1600s the site was abandoned. Historians and archaeologists such as Marvin Jeter have theorized that the Plaquemine "Northern Natchezan" ancestors of the Taensa were in part some of the peoples documented in the early 1540s by the de Soto expedition in southeastern Arkansas and northwestern Mississippi. After the disastrous encounter and subsequent population crash due to the introduction of European diseases and political upheaval left in de Soto's wake, remnant populations of Northern Natchezans migrated down the Mississippi toward their Southern Natchezan cousins. European contact The first securely documented European contact with the Taensa was by the French La Salle expedition of 1682. They were described as having a village on Lake St. Joseph, a narrow crescent shaped oxbow lake located west of the Mississippi, between the Yazoo River and Saint Catherine Creek (near Newellton in modern Tensas Parish, Louisiana). On March 22, 1682 a recollect chaplain who accompanied LaSalle, Father Zenobius, preached to the tribe at this location. La Salles associate Henri de Tonti visited the Taensa again in 1686 and 1690. They numbered approximately 1,200 people scattered throughout seven or eight villages on the western end of the lake and another on the Tensas River near present-day Clayton in Concordia Parish. In 1698 French Catholic missionary priests Antoine Davion and François de Montigny and J. B. La Source (a lay person and possible servant to the priests) visited the Taensa; de Montigny founded a short-lived mission among them. De Montigny at that time records their population as being 700 people. In 1699 French explorer Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville recorded the Taensa as having 300 warriors and living in seven villages named as Taensas, Chaoucoula, Conchayon, Couthaougoula, Nyhougoula, Ohytoucoulas, and Talaspa. The majority of these names are in the Muskogean Mobilian trade language and not the Natchezan Taensa language. During his time with the Taensa, de Montigny prevented them from performing