A greatest hits of archaeological research that has transformed knowledge of human history

Southern Footprints celebrates more than fifty years of archaeological research along the Gulf Coast by the University of South Alabama and the Center for Archaeological Studies. Archaeologists Gregory A. Waselkov and Philip J. Carr, the former and current directors of the center, present the greatest hits that have transformed knowledge of human history on the Alabama and Mississippi Gulf Coast from the Ice Age until recently. Each archaeological site, from surface collections to premiere archaeological preserves, such as Old Mobile and Holy Ground, offers clues to the past.

The chapters in this collection are arranged chronologically and survey the history and archaeology of a wide range of significant sites, including the Gulf Shores canoe canal, Bottle Creek Mounds, Old Mobile, Fort Mims, Spanish Fort, Spring Hill College, and Mobile River Bridge.

Waselkov and Carr take care to acknowledge in these stories populations who have been historically underdocumented, now recognizing the contributions of Native Americans and African Americans that have been uncovered through archaeology. The authors reveal the dire impacts of climate change, environmental disasters, development, and neglect--and convey their urgency to protect these areas of shared history--as a result of the meticulous excavation, analysis, and preservation of artifacts from these sites. Color photographs showcase the archaeology as it unfolds, often with the help of dedicated volunteers. Southern Footprints will serve as an indispensable reference on the rich Gulf Coast heritage for all to appreciate.

A greatest hits of archaeological research that has transformed knowledge of human history

Southeastern Native American forms of domestic architecture underwent multiple transitions between the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. In Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast, Gregory A. Waselkov and ten colleagues track the origins of Native American cabins, structures that incorporated a range of features borrowed from indigenous post-in ground building traditions, Euroamerican horizontal notched-log construction, and elements introduced by Africans and African Americans. Grounded in archaeological investigation, their essays illuminate the distinctive cabin forms developed by various southeastern Native groups, including the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Catawba peoples.
In a rapidly changing social, economic, and political landscape at the frontiers of an expansionist United States, the log cabin, a northern European house form, proved equally adaptable to the needs of settlers, slaves, and Native peoples. Each found ways to make log cabins their own. Beneath these deceptively simple hewn facades, indigenous principles of correctness guided southeastern Indians' uses of interior cabin space, creations of raised clay hearths, and maintenance of pits that gave occupants access to the regenerative properties of the Beneath World. The chapters in this volume make important contributions toward a better understanding of houses and households in the Native Southeast by marshalling new data, methods, and theory to address an important but understudied phenomenon.

Considered a classic study of southeastern Indians, Powhatan's Mantle demonstrates how ethnohistory, demography, archaeology, anthropology, and cartography can be brought together in fresh and meaningful ways to illuminate life in the early South. In a series of provocative original essays, a dozen leading scholars show how diverse Native Americans interacted with newcomers from Europe and Africa during the three hundred years of dramatic change beginning in the early sixteenth century. For this new and expanded edition, the original contributors have revisited their subjects to offer further insights based on years of additional scholarship. The book includes four new essays, on calumet ceremonialism, social diversity in French Louisiana, the gendered nature of Cherokee agriculture, and the ideology of race among Creek Indians. The result is a volume filled with detailed information and challenging, up-to-date reappraisals reflecting the latest interdisciplinary research, ranging from Indian mounds and map symbolism to diplomatic practices and social structure, written to interest fellow scholars and informed general readers. Gregory A. Waselkov is a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Archaeological Studies at the University of South Alabama. He is the coeditor of William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians (Nebraska 2002). Peter H. Wood is a professor of history at Duke University. He is the author of Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America and a coauthor of the U.S. history textbook Created Equal. Tom Hatley is Sequoyah Distinguished Professor in Cherokee Studies at Western Carolina University and the author of The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution. Contributors include: Ian W. Brown, Amy Turner Bushnell, Kathleen DuVal, Patricia Galloway, Tom Hatley, Vernon James Knight Jr., Martha W. McCartney, James H. Merrell, Stephen R. Potter, Claudio Saunt, Marvin T. Smith, Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Daniel H. Usner Jr., Gregory A. Waselkov, and Peter H. Wood.

The Fort Mims massacre changed the course of American history in many ways, not the least of which was the ensuing rise of one Andrew Jackson to the national stage. The unprecedented Indian victory over the encroaching Americans who were bent on taking their lands and destroying their culture horrified many and injured the young nation's pride. Tragedies such as this one have always rallied Americans to a common cause: a single-minded determination to destroy the enemy and avenge the fallen. The August 30, 1813, massacre at Fort Mims, involving hundreds of dead men, women, and children, was just such a spark.

Gregory Waselkov tells compellingly the story of this fierce battle at the fortified plantation home of Samuel Mims in the Tensaw District of the Mississippi Territory. With valuable maps, tables, and artifact illustrations, Waselkov looks closely at the battle to cut through the legends and misinformation that have grown around the event almost from the moment the last flames died at the smoldering ruins. At least as important as the details of the battle, though, is his elucidation of how social forces remarkably converged to spark the conflict and how reverberations of the battle echo still today, nearly two hundred years later.

An archaeological guide to the earliest French settlement on the northern Gulf Coast. Archaeological excavations since 1989 have uncovered exciting evidence of the original townsite of Mobile, first capital of the Louisiana colony, and remnants of the colony's port on Dauphin Island.

Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, a groundbreaking collection of ten essays, covers a broad expanse of time--from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries--and focuses on a common theme of identity. These essays represent the various methods used by esteemed scholars today to study how Native Americans in the distant past created new social identities when old ideas of the self were challenged by changes in circumstance or by historical contingencies.

Archaeologists, anthropologists, and folklorists working in the Southeast have always recognized the region's social diversity; indeed, the central purpose of these disciplines is to study peoples overlooked by the mainstream. Yet the ability to define and trace the origins of a collective social identity--the means by which individuals or groups align themselves, always in contrast to others--has proven to be an elusive goal. Here, editors Gregory A. Waselkov and Marvin T. Smith champion the relational identification and categorical identification processes, taken from sociological theory, as effective analytical tools.

Taking up the challenge, the contributors have deployed an eclectic range of approaches to establish and inform an overarching theme of identity. Some investigate shell gorgets, textiles, shell trade, infrastructure, specific sites, or plant usage. Others focus on the edges of the Mississippian world or examine colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. A final chapter considers the adaptive malleability of historical legend in the telling and hearing of slave narratives.