Two events in the late 1900s changed the direction of ethnohistorical and archaeological scholarship in the U.S. Southeast. The more visible event was the Columbian Quincentenary, which shone light squarely on the nature and consequences of European exploration and land seizure in the Americas. The second event was the 450th anniversary of the entrada led by Hernando de Soto (1539–1543). Scholarship during the late twentieth century had firmly established that Old World diseases brought by the early explorers were responsible for the demise of Indigenous cultures. The broad-brush picture painted over the post-1492 Americas was one of wholesale loss of Native groups from the ravages of successive epidemics and rapid adoption of European technology and goods by the survivors.
The Soto entrada anniversary occasioned a wholesale rethinking of the route of the entrada, principally by Charles Hudson and his collaborators. This work revealed the persistence of Native peoples and their responses to encroachment, population loss, colonial policies, and violence during what has been called the “Forgotten Centuries” (1521–1704). The chapters in this book contribute to the history of Native peoples who lived on the periphery of ever-expanding colonial settlement. Contributors blend material culture studies, architectural evidence, and documentary data to provide insights into the lives of Indigenous peoples of the Native American South and the strategies they developed to navigate the postcontact colonial landscape.
Most important to the editors is reconstructing the social geography of the sixteenth-century Southeast. The transformations of Native cultural institutions and exploration of Indigenous agency relative to the changing social, political, and economic landscape are also central themes. The chapters are geographically diverse, stretching from Spanish Florida to the southern Appalachians to Arkansas and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. An introduction by the editors is followed by 12 substantive chapters and a summary discussion by Robbie Ethridge.
Taking the chapters chronologically at first, the Glass site, in the northeastern Coastal Plain of Georgia, is an Indigenous settlement that may have been visited by the Soto expedition, although it is distant from the generally accepted route of the Soto entrada. Dennis Blanton compares assemblages from southeastern mortuary contexts (most numerous) and encampment sites to evaluate the interpretation of this enigmatic site. Contact with coastal peoples occurred early with subsequent colonial settlement in some locales. John Worth (Spanish Florida), Ramie Gougeon (Florida-Alabama Gulf coast), and Gregory Waselkov and Philip Carr (Mobile, Alabama, and the Gulf coast) describe the variability of adaptations in the zone of greatest direct contact with Europeans.
Most of the chapters, however, concentrate on Native groups in the interior Southeast for whom written documentation is sparse. Contact is usually indirect, with European goods making their way through Indigenous exchange networks. In Arkansas, George Sabo and coauthors propose that the Carden Bottoms site represents a coalescent community that became associated with the production of Dardenne-style ceramics. In Mississippi, Edmond Boudreaux and coauthors find continuity in material culture, settlement location, and settlement organization at the Stark Farm site in the Black Prairie, in contrast to findings of more dramatic changes in other areas. Jay Johnson and Matthew Parish also recognize continuity in scraper types over a 200-year period at the Oliver and Orchard sites in Mississippi. The prevalent view of rapid collapse of Mississippian chiefdoms in the wake of the Soto entrada is not supported by these findings.
In Kentucky, Matthew Davidson considers Fort Ancient farming communities of the central Ohio Valley, emerging from climate-induced social restructuring to confront the challenges of European colonial expansion. He considers women's roles in hide production at the Hardin site, proposing a shift from a joint male-female endeavor to one almost exclusively performed by women. Using mortuary data, Davidson sees evidence of this change in the adoption of a new tool, the mussel-shell scraper, and in women's control of exotic material goods.
Marine shell, an important raw material for items such as gorgets, pins, pendants, and beads, features significantly in Mississippian society. Trading networks between Cherokee groups in the southern Appalachians and coastal communities are clear, but as coastal peoples were affected by exploration, colonization, and missionization, these relationships suffered. Christopher Rodning details the impacts on ceremonialism and social life through mortuary evidence from Cherokee town centers.
In eastern Tennessee, Nathan Shreve and coauthors document the role of eastern Lamar–affiliated peoples in the Middle Nolichucky Valley. Groups in this area had substantial contact with Spaniards during the mid-sixteenth century, and they were middlemen in exchange with groups farther west. As a consequence, they were able to secure substantial quantities of trade goods in their own right.
Maureen Meyers and Denise Bossy discuss activities, strategies, and declines of several Native groups that became militaristic slaving societies. Meyers discusses the Westos (with origins in the Northeast) and Savannahs (from the Midwest), both of whom were feared slavers, initially for Virginia colonists and later for Carolinians. Slaving societies sometimes assisted English entrepreneurs, and at other times, they were perceived as dangerous. After a long association with the Westos, the English allied with the Savannahs against them. Ultimately, the Catawbas were hired to defeat the Savannahs. Bossy focuses on the Yamasees, from their coalescence in the 1660s from the Altamahas, Ocutes, and Ichises. For the Yamasees, slaving was an economic and geopolitical tool, but slaving also had demographic motivations and implications. Bossy details their strategy of recruitment through diplomacy and kinship.
In her summary, Ethridge stresses that Old World diseases were but one factor with which peoples of the Native American South had to contend. Critical to understanding Indigenous transformations were slaving, the fracturing of social and cultural organizations and institutions, falling fertility rates, continuation of internecine warfare, and colonial policies that promoted violence and genocide. The contributions of these authors demonstrate the importance of both Native agency and the varying outcomes of that agency in the history of the postcontact Southeast. They represent building blocks of broader historical narratives that reveal the variability of Indigenous adaptations to the impacts of European invasions.
