In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Foreword The chapters in this volume began as presentations at a 2007 Society for American Archaeology (SAA) meeting held in Austin, Texas. The challenge posed to the presenters—now authors—was to begin with a consideration of case-specific studies of Indian groups adapting/responding to the changing world (i.e., market economy or what constituted a market economy in different North American locales at specific times) between 1775 and 1850, but still maintaining their Indian group identity. The social, economic, and demographic realities of that changing world for Indian groups led to the second challenge: characterizing the diversity of adaptations and significance of Indian ethnic identity as expressed in archaeological , ethnohistorical, and historical/archival research. It was my opinion at the time of the meetings that the papers were remarkably cohesive for a symposium at the SAA—illustrating the diversity of Indian adaptations in an increasingly hostile and marginalized world, as well as the scope of adaptive changes among these groups at different times and places and different geopolitical realities. The papers then were, and book chapters now are, continental in scope, ranging from the Carolinas in the East, Indiana in the Midwest,Texas in the near Southwest, and Colorado in the near West. Virtually all of them share an approach that looks at agency, individual choices, and practices among different Indian groups.The authors then employ that approach in using a nuanced perspective on material culture to tease out strategies and responses—some successful , some not—by Indian groups that are not necessarily apparent from either just archaeological or historical records, but that are synthetic in perspective. Acculturative models and simple dichotomous models of culture contact and change play little part in these book chapters, and that is a positive step forward in presenting a more refined understanding of late-18th- to mid-19th-century life ways of American Indian groups. It is an impressive Indian history that is being offered here, one that archaeology is uniquely equipped to study, once a nuanced appreciation of the meaning of material culture items and subsistence practices can be brought into play. Late-18th- to mid-19th-century American Indian groups had artifacts of European American manufacture and artifacts made from European American raw materials, but that does not tell the whole story. Ultimately, the reader will come away with a clearer view of the realities of culture contact between Indian groups and the British, American, French, and Spanish colonizers. x Foreword The book chapters fall neatly into two groups, regionally and geopolitically, based on the contexts in which culture contacts and the burgeoning colonial and increasingly international market economy played out for Indian groups between 1775 and 1850. First are those groups living among Europeans in 1775, these being among the many groups living in eastern North America that had experienced long and sustained contact and commercial trade with the British and Americans (e.g., Calloway 2003; Rothschild 2003): the Catawba and Cherokee (in this case, a post-Removal Cherokee group in North Carolina). A second set of Indian groups were still living on the frontier in 1775, and they outnumbered Europeans; the market economy revolved around the fur trade and other less expansive commercial economic developments (e.g., the horse trade among the Caddo) (see Usner 1992), represented here by the Wea around the Great Lakes—in a frontier area contested by the British and Americans—the Caddo in east Texas, and unidenti- fied groups in north-central Colorado. The Caddo lived in an area contested between the French and Spanish, and then the Spanish and Americans, and then between Mexicans and Texans (Smith 2005). The diversity in kinds of contact and geopolitical settings in the late 18th through early 19th centuries in these different parts of North America has consequent effects on the adaptive possibilities of Indian groups as well as the character of the archaeological and historical records. American Indian groups such as the Wea and the Caddo, among many others, recognized the advantages of the fur trade for their own purposes and reaped the benefits (i.e., access to goods and gifts), at least for a time.The fur trade from an Indian perspective was not just a market or consumer pursuit: it played a key role in traditional practices surrounding the kin-based exchange of gifts. Unfortunately, these Indian groups were situated between two worlds and two or more colonial powers, and eventually they paid the price because of their...

Share