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.? ø In this anthology, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists analyze the shatter zone created in the colonial Southøby examining the interactions of American Indians and European colonists. The forces that destabilized the region included especially the frenzied commercial traffic in Indian slaves conducted by both Europeans and Indians, which decimated several southern Native communities; the inherently fluid political and social organization oføprecontact Mississippian chiefdoms; and the widespread epidemics that spread across the South. Using examples from a range of Indian communities?Muskogee, Catawba, Iroquois, Alabama, Coushatta, Shawnee, Choctaw, Westo, and Natchez?the contributors assess the shatter zone region as a whole, and the varied ways in which Native peoples wrestled with an increasingly unstable world and worked to reestablish order.

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.

Offers a new framework for understanding the transformation of the Native American South during the first centuries of the colonial era.

"This volume demonstrates how archaeologists working in the Southern Appalachian region over the past 40 years have developed rich interpretations of prehistoric and historic Southeastern Native societies by examining them from multiple scales of analysis. The end results of these examinations demonstrate both the uses and the constraints of multiscalar approaches in reconstructing various lifeways across the Southeast"--

Considered to be one of the all-time classic studies of southeastern Native peoples, Powhatan's Mantle proves more topical, comprehensive, and insightful than ever before in this revised edition for twenty-first century scholars and students.

With essays by Stephen Davis, Penelope Drooker, Patricia K. Galloway, Steven Hahn, Charles Hudson, Marvin Jeter, Paul Kelton, Timothy Pertulla, Christopher Rodning, Helen Rountree, Marvin T. Smith, and John Worth The first two-hundred years of Western civilization in the Americas was a time when fundamental and sometimes catastrophic changes occurred in Native American communities in the South. In The Transformation of the Southeastern Indians, 1540–1760, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists provide perspectives on how this era shaped American Indian society for later generations and how it even affects these communities today. This collection of essays presents the most current scholarship on the social history of the South, identifying and examining the historical forces, trends, and events that were attendant to the formation of the Indians of the colonial South. The essayists discuss how Southeastern Indian culture and society evolved. They focus on such aspects as the introduction of European diseases to the New World, long-distance migration and relocation, the influences of the Spanish mission system, the effects of the English plantation system, the northern fur trade of the English, and the French, Dutch, and English trade of Indian slaves and deerskins in the South. This book covers the full geographic and social scope of the Southeast, including the indigenous peoples of Florida, Virginia, Maryland, the Appalachian Mountains, the Carolina Piedmont, the Ohio Valley, and the Central and Lower Mississippi Valleys.

Landscapes of Movement and Predation is a global study of times and places where people were subject to brutality, displacement, and loss of life, liberty, livelihood, and possessions. Extensive landscapes of predation emerged in the colonial era when Europeans expanded across much of the world, appropriating land and demanding labor from Indigenous people, resulting in the enslavement of millions of Africans and Indigenous Americans. Landscapes of predation also developed in precolonial times in places where people were subjected to repeated ruthless attacks and dislocation. With contributions from archaeologists and a historian, 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. Using ethnohistoric, ethnographic, historic, and archaeological data, the authors explore the actions of both predators and their targets and uncover the myriad responses people took to protect themselves. Contributors Fernando Almeida Thomas John Biginagwa Brenda J. Bowser Catherine M. Cameron Charles Cobb Robbie Ethridge Thiago Kater Richard M. Leventhal Lydia Wilson Marshall Cliverson Pessoa Neil Price Ben Raffield Andrés Reséndez Samantha Seyler Fabíola Andréa Silva