It's an impossible challenge to accurately map the pre-contact distribution of American Indians, since there's not enough evidence in most of the Americas. "Contact" is relative, and it seems anachronistic and almost certainly wrong to map the nations De Soto encountered in the 1540s along with the Powhatan in 1607 with the Pacific Northwest nations and California in the late 18th century. Further, anything before the 17th century in any part of North America is probably impossible, since there's too much guesswork and no real sources, and that era was the start of tribal migrations and wholescale destruction of people due to disease and what not. In all likelihood, most all of the "Native America" that we know is a product of the 16th century onwards. And that's not even getting into the fact that we know that all over North America that tribal migrations have always been occurring. How else can you account for some of the odd linguistic situations? Or the archaeology in parts related to the adoption of the bow where it seems like a group that used the bow outcompeted a group using pre-bow hunting methods and thus either absorbed or displaced that group?
For instance, look at that map of Virginia above. The Catawba were a tiny, insignificant group in North Carolina prior to epidemics decimating the region, where they and some other groups of similar linguistic and cultural affinity merged and the term "Catawba" became the name for all of those groups and thus a new tribal identity. Further, the Yuchi came from Mississippians who lived in Middle Tennessee until the end of their traditional society caused their transition to the Yuchi more familiar to colonial records. Therefore, that map is wrong, but from a certain point of view, also right.
Wikipedia has a
map here that seems to be well-sourced, at least in terms of languages and linguistic affiliation. Note how many compromises the map makes, and note how blank the Eastern US is, simply because of how impossible it is to know. The most interesting part is that a lot of the blank areas are the heartland of the Mississippians. Certainly all the linguistic isolates of cultures associated with the Mississippians (Yuchi, Natchez, Tunica, etc.) is very interesting--who knows how many more there were?
Anyone taking up this challenge has a near impossible task on their hand, but I'd love to see a map as "correct" as possible.