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General Introduction to the Revised Edition
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Scholars of the Americas have long been engaged in speculation and research regarding the peoples who inhabited this hemisphere in so-called pre-Columbian times, before ad 1500, and during the subsequent colonial era, up to roughly 1800.1 Such researchers have faced numerous and basic questions. Which continents did these people come from, when did they first arrive, and what were their numbers? How did they live, and how did they respond to drastic change? Despite its esoteric language and deliberate pace, this many-sided discussion constitutes more than a remote academic discourse. It contains a deep and often hidden significance for our present and future self-understanding. In Latin America, where intensive contact between Indians and non-Indians began earliest and occurred on the largest scale, work has proceeded actively for generations. As early as 1950, much fresh knowledge had been consolidated in the Smithsonian Institution’s seven-volume Handbook of South American Indians. And research has progressed steadily since then, down to the impressive new studies of the present day.2 Regarding North America, in contrast, modern research has proceeded more slowly. Only in recent decades—and particularly since the publication of Powhatan’s Mantle —has a sizable contingent of North American scholars begun systematically to sift through the work of their historian and anthropologist forebears, crossing the persistent geographical and disciplinary boundaries that have impeded general understanding. Beginning from many different quarters, these diverse scholars have slowly started to formulate a clearer picture of the Indians, Africans, and Europeans who peopled America by 1800, at the start of the demographic explosion that shaped our modern world.3 Underlying much of this work has been the gradual emergence of ethnohistory . This approach combines techniques from history and anthropology to study change over time in societies that did not write their own histories. The establishment of the Indian Claims Commission by the United States government in 1946 is often cited as sparking initial efforts in ethnohistory. Suddenly scores of anthropologists, called as expert witnesses, were obliged to interact with historians in making use of written documents to legitiGeneral Introduction to the Revised Edition general introduction mate specific land claims. In the 1950s, regional meetings between anthropologists and historians led to the formation of the American Indian Ethnohistorical Conference, which later expanded into the American Society for Ethnohistory and began publication of the journal Ethnohistory.4 Predictably, the greatest North American advances in Indian ethnohistory initially involved the Southwest (with a sizable Native American population , a long tradition of anthropological study, and a climate suited to archaeology) and the Northeast (with its rich historical resources, its wellendowed and prestigious university centers, and its international scholarly community on both sides of the St. Lawrence). So it is not surprising that several of the earliest completed volumes of the Smithsonian Institution’s new Handbook of North American Indians have covered these two separate areas. But interdisciplinary work in other regions has also proceeded at an encouraging pace, aided by improved field techniques, expanded research tools, and well-run resource centers.5 No single North American region has gained more from this renewed groundswell of scholarly interest than the Southeast, where scholarship arguably had further to come. Important overviews by anthropologist Charles Hudson and historian J. Leitch Wright Jr. (published in 1976 and 1981, respectively ) have been followed in recent years by several important collected works that summarize current knowledge and raise fresh questions.6 The long-awaited Southeast volume of the Handbook of North American Indians repeats this process on a broader scale. Current students therefore can still return to such pioneering authors as John Swanton, James Mooney, Frank G. Speck, and Verner W. Crane, but from now on they will have many more diverse and up-to-date monographic materials available to shape—and no doubt complicate—their endeavors (see postscript).7 These fresh southern materials derive not only from history and anthropology but from archaeology as well.8 Careful fieldwork in the region got an early boost during the Great Depression, when shovels and trowels became tools of survival as well as research. In succeeding decades publicly funded archaeology continued to concentrate on “salvage digs” near large construction projects, where the basic research materials were soon destroyed or covered over forever, after only a brief sampling of the site. In the 1970s and 1980s, construction of the Tellico Dam on the Little Tennessee River resulted in the loss of habitat for the endangered snail darter and in mas- [3...