The Savannah River Chiefdoms
The Savannah River Chiefdoms

Author: David G. Anderson

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 1994-11-30

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 0817307257

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This volume explores political change in chiefdoms, specifically how complex chiefdoms emerge and collapse, and how this process—called cycling—can be examined using archaeological, ethnohistoric, paleoclimatic, paleosubsistence, and physical anthropological data. The focus for the research is the prehistoric and initial contact-era Mississippian chiefdoms of the Southeastern United States, specifically the societies occupying the Savannah River basin from ca. A.D. 1000 to 1600. This regional focus and the multidisciplinary nature of the investigation provide a solid introduction to the Southeastern Mississippian archaeological record and the study of cultural evolution in general.

Zamumo's Gifts
Zamumo's Gifts

Author: Joseph M. Hall, Jr.

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2012-05-26

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 0812202147

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In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo's and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws. Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida's Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo's Gifts highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.

Etowah
Etowah

Author: Adam King

Publisher: University of Alabama Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0817312242

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This a reconstruction of the waxing and waning of political fortunes among the chiefly elites at an important centre of the prehistoric world.

People of the Shoals
People of the Shoals

Author: Kenneth E. Sassaman

Publisher:

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 9780813029450

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"Known best for their innovations in making pottery, these prehistoric foragers occupied the middle Savannah River valley of Georgia and South Carolina some 4,000 years ago. Sassaman offers several controversial theories about the Stallings people, arguing that they arose from interactions between two distinctive ethnic groups, organized themselves around clusters of related women, not men, established permanent villages like their counterparts on the coast, and abandoned the middle Savannah River valley when the social costs of traditional living became intolerable. Basing this work on 12 years of field research, he presents new findings about the Stallings way of life, including details about ritual, marriage alliances, community organization, and food economy.".

Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South
Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South

Author: Robin Beck

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-06-24

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1107355052

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This book provides a new conceptual framework for understanding how the Indian nations of the early American South emerged from the ruins of a precolonial, Mississippian world. A broad regional synthesis that ranges over much of the Eastern Woodlands, its focus is on the Indians of the Carolina Piedmont - the Catawbas and their neighbors - from 1400 to 1725. Using an 'eventful' approach to social change, Robin Beck argues that the collapse of the Mississippian world was fundamentally a transformation of political economy, from one built on maize to one of guns, slaves and hides. The story takes us from first encounters through the rise of the Indian slave trade and the scourge of disease to the wars that shook the American South in the early 1700s. Yet the book's focus remains on the Catawbas, drawing on their experiences in a violent, unstable landscape to develop a comparative perspective on structural continuity and change.

Archaeological Perspectives on the Southern Appalachians
Archaeological Perspectives on the Southern Appalachians

Author: Ramie A. Gougeon

Publisher: Univ. of Tennessee Press

Published: 2015-03-10

Total Pages: 327

ISBN-13: 1621901025

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"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"--

From Chiefdom to State in Early Ireland
From Chiefdom to State in Early Ireland

Author: D. Blair Gibson

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2012-08-27

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1139560700

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This book tracks the development of social complexity in Ireland from the late prehistoric period on into the Middle Ages. Using a range of methods and techniques, particularly data from settlement patterns, Blair Gibson demonstrates how Ireland evolved from constellations of chiefdoms into a political entity bearing the characteristics of a rudimentary state. This book argues that early medieval Ireland's highly complex political systems should be viewed as amalgams of chiefdoms with democratic procedures for choosing leaders rather than kingdoms. Gibson explores how these chiefdom confederacies eventually transformed into recognizable states over a period of 1,400 years.