An Appraisal of the Indigenous Acquisition of Contact-Era European Metal Objects in Southeastern North America

Legg, James B.; Blanton, Dennis B.; Cobb, Charles R.; Smith, Steven D.; Lieb, Brad R.; Boudreaux, Edmond A.

doi:10.1007/s10761-018-0458-1

Cited by 6 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The post-1540 Indigenous social terrain was one of heterogeneity in networks, motives, interaction, and engagement in diverse socio-material realms. Contributing to this complexity, as recently pointed out, is bias in the interpretation of European materials distributed among Indigenous communities rooted in the overreliance on mortuary assemblages (Legg et al 2019), further complicating and problematizing the use of materials as markers of time and temporality.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this sense, we must “embrace anomalous data” and cases that challenge long-standing typological frameworks and narratives (Nassaney 2018:55). Fortunately, contemporary studies of Indigenous-colonizer dynamics across the southeastern United States—and North America more broadly—are now emphasizing both historical contingency at a local scale and histories that are writ large across regions (e.g., Beck 2013; Beck et al 2016, 2017; Boudreaux et al 2020; Cobb 2019; Ethridge and Shuck-Hall 2009; Hofman and Keehnen 2019; Legg et al 2019; Manning and Hart 2019; Thompson et al 2018; Thompson, Marquardt et al 2019; Walder and Yann 2018).…”

Section: Toward Absolute Temporalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Enduring Traditions and the (Im)materiality of Early Colonial Encounters in the Southeastern United States

Holland‐Lulewicz

Thompson

Wettstaed³

et al. 2020

Am. Antiq.

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Hernando de Soto's expedition through the southeastern United States between 1539 and 1543 is often regarded as a watershed moment for the collapse of Indigenous societies across the region. Historical narratives have proposed that extreme depopulation as a result of early contact destabilized Indigenous economies, politics, networks, and traditions. Although processes of depopulation and transformation were certainly set in motion by this and earlier colonial encounters, the timing, temporality, and heterogeneous rhythms of postcontact Indigenous histories remain unclear. Through the integration of radiocarbon and archaeological data from the Mississippian earthen platform mound at Dyar (9GE5) in central Georgia, we present a case of Indigenous endurance and resilience in the Oconee Valley that has long been obfuscated by materially based chronologies and typologies. Bayesian chronological modeling suggests that Indigenous Mississippian traditions persisted for up to 130 years beyond contact with European colonizers. We argue that advances in modeling radiocarbon dates, along with meaningful consultation/collaboration with descendant communities, can contribute to efforts that move us beyond a reliance on materially based chronologies that can distort and erase Indigenous histories.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Toward Absolute Temporalitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Enduring Traditions and the (Im)materiality of Early Colonial Encounters in the Southeastern United States

Holland‐Lulewicz

Thompson

Wettstaed³

et al. 2020

Am. Antiq.

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“…Archaeological investigations suggest that Stark Farms represents a dispersed town or loosely aggregated house groups spread across a substantial upland prairie ridge system. With the onset of our metal detector survey in 2015 at the largest of the Stark Farms sites, 22OK778, we almost immediately discovered iron celts, reworked Biscayanstyle axes, rolled sheet copper-alloy beads, and other metal artifacts (Legg et al 2019). These finds instigated five seasons (2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019) of fieldwork at Stark Farms, with the Chickasaw Nation leading a consortium consisting of the Universities of Mississippi, South Carolina, and Florida.…”

Section: Archaeology At Stark Farmsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We note that we first published a descriptive analysis of a portion of the metal artifact assemblage (Legg et al 2019) in a comparative study with the contemporary Glass site (Georgia) to demonstrate that mechanisms in addition to gifting may have been an important factor in the occurrence of metal objects on sixteenth-century Indigenous sites. In a more recent study (Legg et al 2020), we provided a more thorough descriptive analysis of the assemblage and its context to make the argument that it was probably linked to the Hernando do Soto entrada.…”

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confidence: 99%

The Remains of the Fray: Nascent Colonialism and Heterogeneous Hybridity

et al. 2021

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Investigations at the Native American site complex of Stark Farms in Mississippi, USA, have yielded numerous examples of metal artifacts of European origin. Our study suggests that they derive from contact between the AD 1540–1541 winter encampment of the Spanish Hernando de Soto expedition and the local Indigenous polity. The artifacts display a wide range of modifications, uses, and depositional contexts congruent with hybrid practices. We argue that the early colonial setting of Stark Farms requires a different perspective on cultural mixing than is often applied in studies of European colonialism. This is highlighted by the strongly improvisational nature of the modification of the metal objects, embodying a political climate in which European incursions were precarious and in which hybridity and power were heterogeneous and fluid.

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“…Items initially traded between Native communities and colonists, furthermore, quickly found their way into Indigenous trade networks, and European trade goods and weapons that had originally been held and circulated within elite-based gift-exchange networks became indispensable for daily life, leading to the formation of new entangled relationships between people and materials (see, e.g. Legg et al, 2019). Excavations of an Occaneechi settlement at Fredrick's Site in North Carolina have yielded a range of European materials ranging from guns and gun parts, to lead shot and gunflints, to everyday tools such as knives, hoes, bottles, and spoons and over ten thousand glass beads-a ubiquitous and inexpensive commodity that was sought by Native communities (Ward & Davis Jr., 1993;429: Beck, 2013: 173-74).…”

Section: Living In a Broken World: Shatter Zones In Colonial North Americamentioning

confidence: 99%

Broken Worlds: Towards an Archaeology of the Shatter Zone

Raffield

2021

J Archaeol Method Theory

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In recent years, archaeological studies of long-term change and transformation in the human past have often been dominated by the discussion of dichotomous processes of ‘collapse’ and ‘resilience’. These discussions are frequently framed in relatively narrow terms dictated by specialist interests that place an emphasis on the role of single ‘trigger’ factors as motors for historic change. In order to address this issue, in this article I propose that the study of the ‘shatter zone’—a term with origins in physical geography and geopolitics that has been more recently harnessed in anthropological research—has the potential to facilitate multi-scalar, interdisciplinary analyses of the ways in which major historical changes unfold across both space and time, at local, regional, and inter-regional levels. This article unpacks the concept of the shatter zone and aligns this with existing archaeological frameworks for the study of long-term adaptive change. I then situate these arguments within the context of recent studies of colonial interaction and conflict in the Eastern Woodlands of North America during the sixteenth to eighteenth century. The study demonstrates how a more regulated approach to the shatter zone has the potential to yield new insights on the ways in which populations mitigate and react to instability and change while also facilitating comparative studies of these processes on a broader, global scale.

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An Appraisal of the Indigenous Acquisition of Contact-Era European Metal Objects in Southeastern North America

Cited by 6 publications

References 7 publications

Enduring Traditions and the (Im)materiality of Early Colonial Encounters in the Southeastern United States

Enduring Traditions and the (Im)materiality of Early Colonial Encounters in the Southeastern United States

The Remains of the Fray: Nascent Colonialism and Heterogeneous Hybridity

Broken Worlds: Towards an Archaeology of the Shatter Zone

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