Societies in Eclipse

by Brose, David S.; Cowan, C. Wesley; Mainfort, Robert C., Jr.

• ISBN13: 9781560989813
• ISBN10: 1560989815
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-01
• Publisher: Smithsonian Inst Pr

Summary

Within a generation of initial Native-European contact along North America's shores, European trade and diseases had dramatically altered the lives of inland indigenous tribes. In Societies in Eclipse, archaeologists combine their current discoveries with insights from anthropology, history, and Native oral traditions to examine the cultural transformations among the Eastern Woodlands tribes immediately preceding and following the arrival of Europeans.

After establishing the distribution of prehistoric and historic populations from the north-eastern Appalachian forests to the southern trans-Mississippian prairies, the contributors consider specific groups, including Mohawk and Onondaga, Monacan, Coosa, and Calusa. For each, they present new evidence of cultural changes prior to European contact, including population movements triggered by the Little Ice Age (A.D. 1550-1700), shifting exchange and warfare networks, geological restriction of effective maize subsistence, and use of empty hunting territories as buffers between politically unstable neighbors. The

Table of Contents

List of Figures	vii
List of Tables	ix
List of Contributors	xi
Preface	xiii
Introduction to Eastern North America at the Dawn of European Colonization	1	(8)
David S. Brose
The Distribution of Eastern Woodlands Peoples at the Prehistoric and Historic Interface	9	(10)
George R. Milner
David G. Anderson
Marvin T. Smith
Evolution of the Mohawk Iroquois	19	(8)
Dean R. Snow
Change and Survival among the Onondaga Iroquois since 1500	27	(10)
James W. Bradley
Contact, Neutral Iroquoian Transformation, and the Little Ice Age	37	(12)
William R. Fitzgerald
Penumbral Protohistory on Lake Erie's South Shore	49	(18)
David S. Brose
The Protohistoric Monongahela and the Case for an Iroquois Connection	67	(16)
William C. Johnson
Transformation of the Fort Ancient Cultures of the Central Ohio Valley	83	(24)
Penelope B. Drooker
C. Wesley Cowan
Monacan Archaeology of the Virginia Interior, A.D. 1400-1700	107	(18)
Jeffrey L. Hantman
Tribes and Traders on the North Carolina Piedmont, A.D. 1000-1710	125	(18)
H. Trawick Ward
R. P. Stephen Davis Jr.
The Rise and Fall of Coosa, A.D. 1350-1700	143	(14)
Marvin T. Smith
The Emergence and Demise of the Calusa	157	(16)
William H. Marquardt
The Late Prehistoric and Protohistoric Periods in the Central Mississippi Valley	173	(18)
Robert C. Mainfort Jr.
The Vacant Quarter Hypothesis and the Yazoo Delta	191	(14)
Stephen Williams
Prelude to History on the Eastern Prairies	205	(24)
James A. Brown
Robert F. Sasso
Postscript	229	(4)
David Hurst Thomas
References Cited	233	(46)
Index	279