This book synthesizes the landscape histories of Native Americans in southeastern North America from the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century to the first decades of the American Republic. Relying on archaeological data and historical sources, the work outlines the ways in which Native populations accommodated and contested the growing encroachments of colonialism and colonial powers. Traditional landscape practices were greatly transformed by epidemic diseases, chronic warfare, and a widespread slave trade in Indian populations. Research demonstrates that populations adapted to t ... More

This book synthesizes the landscape histories of Native Americans in southeastern North America from the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century to the first decades of the American Republic. Relying on archaeological data and historical sources, the work outlines the ways in which Native populations accommodated and contested the growing encroachments of colonialism and colonial powers. Traditional landscape practices were greatly transformed by epidemic diseases, chronic warfare, and a widespread slave trade in Indian populations. Research demonstrates that populations adapted to these challenges in two major ways. First, they built on traditional histories of mobility to develop new modes of migration and travel to escape regions of conflict and to gain access to important colonial towns and resources. Second, seeking safety in numbers, Native Americans increasingly formed coalescent communities composed of two or more cultural groups. These coalescent communities evolved into the groups known today as Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Catawbas, and Seminoles. The study further explores how the evolution of these groups was connected to events and processes of the broader political economy in the 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.