Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast ed. by Gregory A. Waselkov (review)

Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast is an essay collection that came out of the 2016 Southeastern Archaeological Conference. The dozen contributors include professors of anthropology, archaeology, and Cherokee studies; a coordinator of a Cherokee language program and an associate director of a research archaeology laboratory; and archaeologists for the state of North Carolina, the Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research team, and the Exploring Joara Foundation. While each chapter presents a different case study of the relationships among Catawbas, Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, and their black and white neighbors, the entire collection argues that Native American adoption of notched-log cabin architecture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an example of strategic adaptation, not assimilation.

Essays explore case studies of southeastern Native American transitions from wattle-and-daub structures to notched-log cabins, often with intermediate house styles such as unnotched and post-and-rail. The physical area studied varies. For instance, chapter 4 examines twenty separate log cabin sites across Catawba territory; chapter 5 focuses on the Hickory Log Town site (home to 611 Cherokees in 1808–1809); and chapter 7 interprets the small Choctaw Chickasawhay site. The case studies yield surprising and sometimes seemingly contradictory information about why Native Americans adopted log cabins. While most of the archaeological evidence presented suggests that ethnically mixed, politically well connected, and socially mobile families were among the first to adopt Euro-American buildings, the revitalizationist Redstick Creeks also built log cabins with unique innovations. In every chapter, the authors are careful to point out that Native American reasons for adopting aspects of Euro-American culture were complex and often held spiritual or symbolic meaning. Root cellars had significance beyond storing vegetables, Brett H. Riggs and Thomas N. Belt argue; as subterranean structures, they represented new embodiments of familiar communal and religious concepts like o:si and connection with the earth.

The challenges of recovering archaeological data from early-nineteenth-century Native American cabin sites—including inevitable rotting, the paucity of subterranean evidence left by cabins compared with post-constructed buildings, and the destruction caused by decades of plowing—are clearly laid out in chapter 1. The many chapter authors’ use of cellars and hearths as identifying markers of cabin sites and their arguments about evidentiary challenges are both helpful to other researchers and accessible to the general reader.

Each author examines how documentary evidence complements their research, displaying ethnohistorical methodology. Written descriptions by James Adair, William Bartram, Samuel Worcester, and Benjamin Hawkins are featured alongside those of dozens of lesser-known white observers of the Native American Southeast. The authors deal candidly with issues in the primary documents as well; Riggs and Belt open chapter 6 with Methodist itinerant J. P. Evans’s account of an 1830s Cherokee community: “Their dwellings generally consist of small log huts, too insignificant to need a description” (p. 111). Riggs and Belt use this quotation to demonstrate how archaeology can fill gaps in the written record. Other authors use primary documents to confirm their findings and guide their excavations, demonstrating how both history and archaeology can contribute to understudied topics like nineteenth-century Native American architecture.

Because much of the book is based on ongoing archaeological research, there are conjectures and tentative conclusions. Though she suspects otherwise, Ashley A. Dumas concludes her essay on African American influence on Native American architecture by stating there is currently no hard evidence “that the roughly contemporaneous spread of notched-log construction and the use of black slaves among Native Americans for American-style agriculture was anything other than coincidence” (p. 183). Indeed, much of the final chapter is devoted to discussing future avenues of research. One of the most intriguing possibilities is greater connection between southeastern Native American architecture and that of Iroquoian and Algonquian peoples in the Great Lakes, Midwest, and mid-Atlantic regions. Instead of looking at these regions as separate, the authors encourage future scholarship...