The Archaeology of Traditions

"At last, southeastern archaeology as history of people, not just 'cultures'."--Patricia Galloway, Mississippi Department of Archives and History

Rich with the objects of the day-to-day lives of illiterate or common people in the southeastern United States, this book offers an archaeological reevaluation of history itself: where it is, what it is, and how it came to be. Through clothing, cooking, eating, tool making, and other mundane forms of social expression and production, traditions were altered daily in encounters between missionaries and natives, between planters and slaves, and between native leaders and native followers. As this work demonstrates, these "unwritten texts" proved to be potent ingredients in the larger-scale social and political events that shaped how peoples, cultures, and institutions came into being. These developments point to a common social process whereby men and women negotiated about their views of the world and--whether slaves, natives, or Europeans--created history. Bridging the pre-Columbian and colonial past, this book incorporates current theories that cut across disciplines to appeal to anthropologists, historians, and archaeologists.

CONTENTS

1. A New Tradition in Archaeology, by Timothy R. Pauketat

2. African-American Tradition and Community in the Antebellum South, by Brian W. Thomas

3. Resistance and Accommodation in Apalachee Province, by John F. Scarry

4. Manipulating Bodies and Emerging Traditions at the Los Adaes Presidio, by Diana DiPaolo Loren

5. Negotiated Tradition? Native American Pottery in the Mission Period in La Florida, by Rebecca Saunders

6. Creek and Pre-Creek Revisited, by Cameron B. Wesson

7. Gender, Tradition, and the Negotiation of Power Relationships in Southern Appalachian Chiefdoms, by Lynne P. Sullivan and Christopher B. Rodning

8. Historical Science or Silence? Toward a Historical Anthropology of Mississippian Political Culture, by Mark A. Rees

9. Cahokian Change and the Authority of Tradition, by Susan M. Alt

10. The Historical-Processual Development of Late Woodland Societies, by Michael S. Nassaney

11. A Tradition of Discontinuity: American Bottom Early and Middle Woodland Culture History Reexamined, by Andrew C. Fortier

12. Interpreting Discontinuity and Historical Process in Midcontinental Late Archaic and Early Woodland Societies, by Thomas E. Emerson and Dale L. McElrath

13. Hunter-Gatherers and Traditions of Resistance, by Kenneth E. Sassaman

14. Traditions as Cultural Production: Implications for Contemporary Archaeological Research, by Kent G. Lightfoot

15. Concluding Thoughts on Tradition, History, and Archaeology, by Timothy R. Pauketat

Timothy R. Pauketat, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana, is the author of The Ascent of Chiefs and coeditor of Cahokia: Domination and Ideology in the Mississippian World.