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"Published with the generous support of Fernbank"--Title page.
Between the 16th and 19th centuries as indigenous Native Americans, colonizing Europeans, and Africans came into sustained contact in North America, their cultures underwent a variety of complex transformations. While other scholarly books that examine "cultural contact" have traditionally viewed the issue through a single lens, this collection offers a strikingly different picture by collecting a variety of archaeological and ethnohistorical perspectives to formulate an interdisciplinary investigation.
North American Indians cultivated tobacco beginning in prehistory, often through great effort and for multiple reasons. Especially valued for its narcotic effects, however, tobacco was assigned sacred status and became a necessary component for any event with cultural or religious significance. As such, ritualistic tobacco use joined cult usage of other plants as Native American societies evolved throughout the Mississippian time period. In Mississippian Smoking Ritual in the Southern Appalachian Region, Dennis B. Blanton surveys smoking pipes found at archaeological sites throughout southern Appalachia and neighboring areas to present a holistic picture of Native American smoking rituals in...
Beginning with the first colonists and continuing down to the present, the dominant narrative of New England Puritanism has maintained that piety and prosperity were enemies, that the rise of commerce delivered a mortal blow to the fervor of the founders, and that later generations of Puritans fell away from their religious heritage as they moved out across the New England landscape. This book offers a new alternative to the prevailing narrative, which has been frequently criticized but heretofore never adequately replaced. The authors argument follows two main strands. First, he shows that commercial development, rather than being detrimental to religion, was necessary to sustain Puritan ...
In Ocmulgee Archaeology, 1936-1986 more than twenty archaeologists reexamine the findings of the largest archaeological excavation ever undertaken in Georgia. The sixteen essays in this volume were originally presented at a symposium commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Ocmulgee National Monument. The symposium provided archaeologists with an opportunity to update some of the work begun a half-century before and to bring it into the larger context of southeastern history and culture and general advances in archaeological research and methodology. Among the topics discussed are platform mounds, settlement patterns, agronomic practices, earth lodges, human skeletal remains, Macon Plateau culture origins, relations of site inhabitants with other aboriginal societies and Europeans, and the challenges of administering excavations and park development. Some of the contributors participated in the Ocmulgee project and thus are able to offer personal perspectives on the value of the work that was accomplished and the potential of the work that still remains to be done.
The years AD 1500–1700 were a time of dramatic change for the indigenous inhabitants of southeastern North America, yet Native histories during this era have been difficult to reconstruct due to a scarcity of written records before the eighteenth century. Using archaeology to enhance our knowledge of the period, Contact, Colonialism, and Native Communities in the Southeastern United States presents new research on the ways Native societies responded to early contact with Europeans. Featuring sites from Kentucky to Mississippi to Florida, these case studies investigate how indigenous groups were affected by the expeditions of explorers such as Hernando de Soto, Pánfilo de Narváez, and Jua...
In this innovative work, Julia King moves nimbly among a variety of sources and disciplinary approaches—archaeological, historical, architectural, literary, and art-historical—to show how places take on, convey, and maintain meanings. Focusing on the beautiful Chesapeake Bay region of Maryland, King looks at the ways in which various groups, from patriots and politicians of the antebellum era to present-day archaeologists and preservationists, have transformed key landscapes into historical, indeed sacred, spaces. The sites King examines include the region’s vanishing tobacco farms; St. Mary’s City, established as Maryland’s first capital by English settlers in the seventeenth cent...
"This book is the definitive study of imperial Chinese local gazetteers, one of the most important sources for premodern Chinese studies. Methodologically innovative, it represents a major contribution to the history of books, publishing, reading, and society. By examining how gazetteers were read, Joseph R. Dennis illustrates their significance in local societies and national discourses. His analysis of how gazetteers were initiated and produced reconceptualizes the geography of imperial Chinese publishing. Whereas previous studies argued that publishing, and thus cultural and intellectual power, were concentrated in the southeast, Dennis shows that publishing and book ownership were widely...
"Cliff Boyd's collection of archaeological research honors the long and distinguished career of Gerald Schroedl, who came to the University of Tennessee in 1971 to work on the Tellico Archaeological Project and officially joined the Department of Anthropology in 1978. By design, these essays reflect the sites--such as Citico, Plum Grove, and Brimstone Hill in the Caribbean--and the disciplines--essays on prehistory and Cherokee archaeology--in which Schroedl worked. The collection includes a preface on Schroedl's career and an afterword reflecting on the direction of southeastern archaeology"--
Licentious Gotham, set in the streets, news depots, publishing houses, grand jury chambers, and courtrooms of the nation's great metropolis, delves into the stories of the enterprising men and women who created a thriving transcontinental market for sexually arousing books and pictures. The experiences of fancy publishers, flash editors, and racy novelists, who all managed to pursue their trade in the face of laws criminalizing obscene publications, dramatically convey nineteenth-century America's daring notions of sex, gender, and desire, as well as the frequently counterproductive results of attempts to enforce conventional moral standards. In nineteenth-century New York, the business of e...