Peoples of the Inland Sea: Native Americans and Newcomers in the Great Lakes Region, 1600–1870 by David Andrew Nichols (review)

David Nichols's Peoples of the Inland Sea is the second book in a series dealing with new approaches to midwestern history. According to L. Diane Barnes and Paul Finkelman, the series editors, "the books in this series capture the complexity of the Midwest and its historical and continuing role in the development of modern America" and in particular "explore regional identity in the nation's past through the lens of the American Midwest [because] stereotypical images of the region ignore the complexity and vibrancy of the region, as well as the vital role it has played—and continues to play—in the nation's economy, politics, and social history (xiii, xi).

The geographical focus of Peoples of the Inland Sea conforms generally to the boundaries of the Old Northwest Territories—that is, the entirety of the central and western Great Lakes drainage basins as well as those areas north of the Ohio River valley that drain into the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. A large geographical area, to be sure, that includes multiple cultures who had adapted to a myriad of types of physical and social environments between a.d. 1600 and 1870.

My primary criticism of Peoples, and it is surely mixed, is Nichols's use of out-of-date or incorrect anthropological and archaeological information as, shown between pages 11 and 23. I must first state that I commend Nichols—a professional historian—for incorporating anthropological and archaeological background information to set the stage for an understanding of the prehistoric cultural contexts of various complex Great Lakes Native cultures. Nichols does so to explain the temporal depth of the cultural base from which Native cultures evolved; then he documents how those cultures developed into the different Native cultures Europeans first observed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

As a result, chapter 1 is rife with errors, beginning with the now questionable Bering Strait single theory entry route (13). There is no mention of Pre-paleo Indians, for which there is a growing body of acceptable scientific data (that is, pre-12,000 years ago). Nichols offers a "necessity is the mother of invention" explanation for why Paleo Indians transitioned into the Archaic Tradition Natives as a new form of subsistence adaptation (14). There is a total misunderstanding of the purpose and function of the atlatl, which was used not to throw spears farther but to generate greater velocity while throwing the spear to penetrate thick hides of Pleistocene mega-fauna. Atlatls date back easily to 20,000 years ago in the Old World, prior to being brought into the New World between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago (14). Further, Nichols does not use the concept of a cultural tradition (i.e., the Archaic Tradition—a way of life that persists through time), but, rather, he employs a geological term, era (15). Also, the Archaic Era [sic] did not just "end," as Nichols suggests, and begin anew as the Woodland Tradition, but rather the Archaic Tradition transitioned culturally in different locations at different times, eventually emerging as a new cultural tradition practiced hunting and gathering and people supplemented their diets with incipient horticultural pursuits, engaged in mound-building (the first of three major mound-building periods), created and used ceramics, and began living in semipermanent to permanent residences. Life does not fit nicely into evenly divided boxes of time, but rather older ways of life "feather out" as new ways of living (i.e., adapting) are gradually assumed. Finally, Nichols repeats an old and inaccurate reference, that not until the end of the nineteenth century would men of science refute the notion that Mound Builders were an extinct, "ancient" race of Phoenicians, or remnants of the Ten Lost Tribes (21–22). Indeed, both George Rogers Clark (1779) and Thomas Jefferson (1784) clearly penned assessments that prehistoric Ohio and...