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The Forgotten Centuries Indians and Europeans in the American South, 1 521-1704 Edited by Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser University of Georgia Press, 1994 472 pp. Cloth, $50.00; paper, $25.00 Reviewed by Sarah H. Hill, independent scholar in Adanta, Georgia. A graduate of the Institute for the Liberal Arts at Emory University, she has recendy completed Weaving New Worlds: A History ofSoutheastern Cherokee Women and TheirBasketry, to be published in July of 1997. In this rich and dense volume, Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser have brought together anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians to reconstruct the world of southeastern interior American Indians in die two centuries between initial Spanish contact and the English founding of Charles Town. These are forgotten centuries, according to the editors, that are missing from surveys of American history as well as from the memories of eighteenth-century southeastern natives. While the latter is an assumption that cannot be tested, the former is regrettably true. The editors attribute such pervasive historical amnesia to diverse sources, including the bias of Anglocentric historians, special research problems associated widi records of these two centuries, and a traditional lack of collaboration between anthropologists and historians. This publication brings to the forefront the forgotten centuries of Native and European American history and renders obsolete the tide of the book. The volume is an invaluable resource for scholars and students of the American South. Divided into four sections, seventeen articles include the most recent scholarship on Spanish explorations, new models ofsocial systems, and lucid summaries of knowledge accumulated in the past decade. The sections and essays widiin them are arranged chronologically by subject from the earliest sixteenth-century Spanish abduction of Native Americans to eighteenth-century Native formation ofnew polities. The organization underscores the dramatic change among interior Natives that the papers detail. The first section, "Exploration of the Southeast," relies most heavily on published and unpublished Spanish documents to trace early Spanish expeditions and the interior groups they confronted. AnthropologistJohn Scarry establishes the framework for the entire volume in "The Late Prehistoric Southeast." By sketching varied environmental zones, Scarry verifies the complexity of Native Reviews 91 societies that successfully adapted to them before developing into chiefdoms in the Mississippian period. Three subsequent papers in the first section reconstruct routes ofSpanish explorers. In two consecutive essays ("Lucas Vaquez de Ayllon's Discovery and Colony" and "Narvaez and Cabeza de Vaca in Florida"), historian Paul Hoffman continues his work ofexplicating the confused explorations ofthe earliest conquistadors, whose landing sites and journey routes await archaeological verification. Anthropologist Charles Hudson presents his long-anticipated reconstruction of the route of the Hernando de Soto expedition of 1 5 39 to 1 543, which will engender lively debate among geographers, archaeologists, and historians for some time. Hudson does not argue his case in this volume, but clearly delineates the proposed route for others to examine. The first section's final essay, by archaeologistJohn Worth, examines late Spanish military expeditions in the interior Southeast from 1 597 to 1628. These litde-known or -reported entradas marked the last contact between interior Indians and the Spanish military. Worth's articulate contribution indicates the kinds of information that can be gleaned from previously untranslated Spanish documents. While the first section concentrates on Spanish explorations, four essays in the second draw from archaeological data to focus on the Native polities the Spanish encountered. "The Southeastern Indian Chiefdoms" begins with anthropologist Randolph Widmer's fundamental model for "The Structure of Southeastern Chiefdoms." In the absence ofadequate ethnographic data, such models can help interpret incomplete and contradictory records. The remaining essays in the second section undertake the reconstruction of specific chiefdoms and collectively document differences between Mississippian polities in different areas of the Southeast. These articles also reveal the kinds of disagreements about chiefdom size, location, and primacy that engage contemporary scholars. Combining Spanish documents and historical analyses with archaeological data,John Scarry's second essay details the emergence and dissolution of"The Apalachee Chiefdom: A Mississippian Society on the Fringe ofthe Mississippian World." Focusing on the interior Piedmont, archaeologist Mark Williams utilizes a decade of research to explicate the formation, consolidation, and abandonment of the Oconee Province chiefdom. Questions...

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