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Patrolling the Border focuses on a late eighteenth-century conflict between Creek Indians and Georgians. The conflict was marked by years of seemingly random theft and violence culminating in open war along the Oconee River, the contested border between the two peoples. Joshua S. Haynes argues that the period should be viewed as the struggle of nonstate indigenous people to develop an effective method of resisting colonization. Using database and digital mapping applications, Haynes identifies one such method of resistance: a pattern of Creek raiding best described as politically motivated border patrols. Drawing on precontact ideas and two hundred years of political innovation, border patrols harnessed a popular spirit of unity to defend Creek country. These actions, however, sharpened divisions over political leadership both in Creek country and in the infant United States. In both polities, people struggled over whether local or central governments would call the shots. As a state-like institution, border patrols are the key to understanding seemingly random violence and its long-term political implications, which would include, ultimately, Indian removal.

This book argues for a renewed understanding of the fundamentally uncanny quality of the medium of photography. It especially makes the case for the capacity of certain photographs—precisely through their uncanniness—to contest structures of political and social dominance. The uncanny as a quality that unsettles the perception of home emerges as a symptom of modern and contemporary society and also as an aesthetic apparatus by which some key photographs critique the hegemony of capitalist and industrialist domains. The book’s historical scope is large, beginning with William Henry Fox Talbot and closing with contemporary indigenous photographer Bear Allison and contemporary African American photographer Devin Allen. Through close readings, exegesis, of individual photographs and careful deployment of contemporary political and aesthetic theory, The Photographic Uncanny argues for a re-envisioning of the political capacity of photography to expose the haunted, homeless, condition of modernity.

Honorable Mention, Southern Anthropological Society James Mooney Award Native American populations both accommodated and resisted the encroachment of European powers in southeastern North America from the arrival of Spaniards in the sixteenth century to the first decades of the American republic. Tracing changes to the region’s natural, cultural, social, and political environments, Charles Cobb provides an unprecedented survey of the landscape histories of Indigenous groups across this critically important area and time period.  Cobb explores how Native Americans responded to the hardships of epidemic diseases, chronic warfare, and enslavement. Some groups developed new modes of migration and travel to escape conflict while others built new alliances to create safety in numbers. Cultural maps were redrawn as Native communities evolved into the groups known today as the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Catawba, and Seminole peoples. Cobb connects the formation of these coalitions to events in the wider Atlantic World, including the rise of plantation slavery, the growth of the deerskin trade, the birth of the consumer revolution, and the emergence of capitalism.  Using archaeological data, historical documents, and ethnohistorical accounts, Cobb argues that Native inhabitants of the Southeast successfully navigated the challenges of this era, reevaluating long-standing assumptions that their cultures collapsed under the impact of colonialism. A volume in the series the American Experience in Archaeological Perspective, edited by Michael S. Nassaney

Synthesizes the archaeology of the Apalachicola-lower Chattahoochee Valley region of northwest Florida, southeast Alabama, and southwest Georgia, from 1,300 years ago to recent times

Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions. Award-winning historian Gregory D. Smithers brings this world to life in Native Southerners, a sweeping narrative of American Indian history in the Southeast from the time before European colonialism to the Trail of Tears and beyond. In the Native South, as in much of North America, storytelling is key to an understanding of origins and tradition—and the stories of the indigenous people of the Southeast are central to Native Southerners. Spanning territory reaching from modern-day Louisiana and Arkansas to the Atlantic coast, and from present-day Tennessee and Kentucky through Florida, this book gives voice to the lived history of such well-known polities as the Cherokees, Creeks, Seminoles, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, as well as smaller Native communities like the Nottoway, Occaneechi, Haliwa-Saponi, Catawba, Biloxi-Chitimacha, Natchez, Caddo, and many others. From the oral and cultural traditions of these Native peoples, as well as the written archives of European colonists and their Native counterparts, Smithers constructs a vibrant history of the societies, cultures, and peoples that made and remade the Native South in the centuries before the American Civil War. What emerges is a complex picture of how Native Southerners understood themselves and their world—a portrayal linking community and politics, warfare and kinship, migration, adaptation, and ecological stewardship—and how this worldview shaped and was shaped by their experience both before and after the arrival of Europeans. As nuanced in detail as it is sweeping in scope, the narrative Smithers constructs is a testament to the storytelling and the living history that have informed the identities of Native Southerners to our day.

"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"--

Archaeologists of South Carolina and Florida and historians of the Native South, Spanish Florida, and British Carolina address elusive questions about Yamasee identity, political and social networks, and the fate of the Yamasees after the Yamasee War.

This book is a synthesis of research spanning archaeology, geology, geography, history, ecology, and ethnography. It follows the history of the Apalachicola people who contributed to the culture that was later called the Creek Indians in the Southeastern United States. Apalachicola is the origin story of the Creek Indians and how they adapted to a changing environment and shows that specific institutions, subsistence strategies, and social organizations developed as a risk management strategy and a form of resilience. It is unique in its comprehensive and long-term study of a community. It identifies and demonstrates a new way of understanding the development of political institutions and regime change. Incorporating the role of social groups that are under discussed by archaeological studies, the book offers a new and novel understanding of the development of complex societies in the Southeastern United States. It also includes a holistic view of the entire social and economic organizations rather than just an aspect of the economy or politics and shows how this culture developed a society that dealt with an unpredictable environment by distributing risks, knowledge, and authority throughout the society. The social and political organization of these Native American peoples was adapted to a particular environment that was altered when Europeans immigrated to the Americas. The book is relevant to scholars interested in Southeastern North American archaeology and history, ecological resilience, political change, colonialism, gender studies, ecology, and more.

At its height the Creek Nation comprised a collection of multiethnic towns and villages with a domain stretching across large parts of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida. By the 1830s, however, the Creeks had lost almost all this territory through treaties and by the unchecked intrusion of white settlers who illegally expropriated Native soil. With the Jackson administration unwilling to aid the Creeks, while at the same time demanding their emigration to Indian territory, the Creek people suffered from dispossession, starvation, and indebtedness. Between the 1825 Treaty of Indian Springs and the arrival of detachment six in the West in late 1837, nearly twenty-three thousand Creek Indians were moved—voluntarily or involuntarily—to Indian territory. Rivers of Sand fills a substantial gap in scholarship by capturing the full breadth and depth of the Creeks’ collective tragedy during the marches westward, on the Creek home front, and during the first years of resettlement. Unlike the Cherokee Trail of Tears, which was conducted largely at the end of a bayonet, most Creeks were relocated through a combination of coercion and negotiation. Hopelessly outnumbered military personnel were forced to make concessions in order to gain the compliance of the headmen and their people. Christopher D. Haveman’s meticulous study uses previously unexamined documents to weave narratives of resistance and survival, making Rivers of Sand an essential addition to the ethnohistory of American Indian removal.