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Reconstructing the human and natural environment of the Creek Indians in frontier Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee, Robbie Ethridge illuminates a time of wrenching transition. Creek Country presents a compelling portrait of a culture in crisis, of its resiliency in the face of profound change, and of the forces that pushed it into decisive, destructive conflict. Ethridge begins in 1796 with the arrival of U.S. Indian Agent Benjamin Hawkins, whose tenure among the Creeks coincided with a period of increased federal intervention in tribal affairs, growing tension between Indians and non-Indians, and pronounced strife within the tribe. In a detailed description of Creek town life, t...
In this sweeping regional history, anthropologist Robbie Ethridge traces the metamorphosis of the Native South from first contact in 1540 to the dawn of the eighteenth century, when indigenous people no longer lived in a purely Indian world but rather on the edge of an expanding European empire. Using a framework that Ethridge calls the "Mississippian shatter zone" to explicate these tumultuous times, From Chicaza to Chickasaw examines the European invasion, the collapse of the precontact Mississippian world, and the restructuring of discrete chiefdoms into coalescent Native societies in a colonial world. The story of one group--the Chickasaws--is closely followed through this period.
During the two centuries following European contact, the world of late prehistoric Mississippian chiefdoms collapsed and Native communities there fragmented, migrated, coalesced, and reorganized into new and often quite different societies. The editors of this volume, Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, argue that such a period and region of instability and regrouping constituted a "shatter zone."
A sweeping new history reveals how the Cherokees became a nation as they navigated a century and a half of intertribal conflicts and colonial expansion that threatened their way of life. For more than 150 years between their first encounters with the English in the 1670s and forced removal along the Trail of Tears, the Cherokees negotiated mounting pressures. As their world was convulsed by the spread of European diseases, competition for guns, furs, and deerskins, and imperial powers’ unrelenting pursuit of “savage” allies, Cherokee communities responded by creating new solidarities. At the dawn of the eighteenth century, the idea of unity among the widely dispersed Cherokees would sc...
This volume uses case studies to capture the recent emphasis on history in archaeological reconstructions of America’s deep past. Previously, archaeologists studying “prehistoric” America focused on long-term evolutionary change, imagining ancient societies like living organisms slowly adapting to environmental challenges. Contributors to this volume demonstrate how today’s researchers are incorporating a new awareness that the precolonial era was also shaped by people responding to historical trends and forces. Essays in this volume delve into sites across what is now the United States Southeast—the St. Johns River Valley, the Gulf Coast, Greater Cahokia, Fort Ancient, the souther...
Decolonizing the Diet challenges the common claim that Native American communities were decimated after 1492 because they lived in “Virgin Soils” that were biologically distinct from those in the Old World. Comparing the European transition from Paleolithic hunting and gathering with Native American subsistence strategies before and after 1492, the book offers a new way of understanding the link between biology, ecology and history. Synthesizing the latest work in the science of nutrition, immunity and evolutionary genetics with cutting-edge scholarship on the history of indigenous North America, Decolonizing the Diet highlights a fundamental model of human demographic destruction: human...
Landscapes of Movement and Predation is a global study of times and places, in the colonial and precolonial eras, where people were subject to brutality, displacement, and loss of life, liberty, livelihood, and possessions. The book provides a startling new perspective on an aspect of the past that is often overlooked: the role of violence in shaping where, how, and with whom people lived.
From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715
Between 1539 and 1542 Hernando de Soto led a small army on a desperate journey of exploration of almost four thousand miles across the U. S. Southeast. Until the 1998 publication of Charles M. Hudson's foundational Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun, De Soto's path had been one of history's most intriguing mysteries. With this book, anthropologist Charles Hudson offers a solution to the question, "Where did de Soto go?" Using a new route reconstruction, for the first time the story of the de Soto expedition can be laid on a map, and in many instances it can be tied to specific archaeological sites. Arguably the most important event in the history of the Southeast in the sixteenth century,...