Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast: Depopulation During the Early Historic Period
Members of Hernando de Soto's 1540 march through the interior of the southeastern United States, as well as other explorers at that time, described encounters with complex and powerful Indian chiefdoms. Until this detailed work by Marvin T. Smith, first published in 1987, scholars had argued about the role that Europeans played in the disintegration of that Mississippian culture. Rejecting the notion that the aboriginal nations acculturated to a European pattern, Smith shows that Old World epidemic diseases caused immediate population loss in interior areas. He develops a chronological framework for the period 1540-1670 based on European trade goods, which allows him to date the aboriginal sites and to examine the tempo of demographic shifts with more precision than archaeologists before him commanded. The effects of early European contact-documented with data that include artifacts associated with burial practices, public works, and craft specialization-traveled farther than the European explorers themselves, as depopulation led to political breakdown and social collapse. One product of this collapse, Smith argues, was the Creek Confederacy of the eighteenth century, a mix of refugee populations who banded together in defense alliances against the Europeans and other Indians. Marvin T. Smith is a senior archaeologist at Garrow and Associates in Atlanta. 198pp. 6 X 9. Illustrations, tables, appendixes, bibliography, index 0-8130-0846-8 $55.00 (cloth)
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“This superb archaeological study establishes the chronological controls that finally make it possible to discriminate the dynamic events of depopulation and culture change that occurred during the historical interregnum of the late sixteenth and most of the seventeenth centuries in the Southeast.” –Jeffrey P. Brain, Peabody Museum, Harvard University
"Marvin T. Smith's monograph is an elegant synthesis of cultural change as seen in the rgional archaeological and ethnohistorical records in the interior Southeast (that portion of the southeastern United States north or west of the fall line region and east of the Mississippi River Valley) during the Early Historic Period (1525-1670)." |
