Cultural Continuity and Variable Adaptation of the Historic Period Muscogee of the Southeastern United States

Abstract

Many researchers of the native people from the southeastern United States have tended to segregate studies of historic period Native Americans from prehistoric period Native Americans because of the assumption that historic period native people were significantly different from their pre-European contact ancestors. This article describes recent archaeological, ethnographic, and historical research on the Muscogee Creek that indicates that they were often resilient and variable in their response to culture change during the Historic Period. Archaeological and ethnohistoric measures of settlement show that the Muscogee Creek people maintained regional town settlement alliances as well as internal town settlement layout throughout the Historic Period. The botanical portion of the diet and pottery styles remained resilient to change for hundreds of years while other aspects of the economy changed. These variable responses to economic and material culture change may reflect gender differences in response to European and African culture contact. Many processes of culture change occur over long periods of time. Anthropologists have long recognized this and have developed and used a variety of approaches and theories that deal with long-term processes such as historical anthropology (