The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era by Charles R. Cobb (review)

The intersection between geography, anthropology, history and archaeology is a complicated and exciting place. In this rich and thought-provoking book, Charles Cobb uses these different points of view in Southeastern North America, using a concept of landscape to construct his transdisciplinary study of Native Americans before, during and after contact with Europeans from England, France and Spain. Seven chapters guide the reader through an overview of theoretical approaches, an explication of landscape theory, movements of groups across the region, historical differences between different "capitalisms," large scale environmental disruptions and a consideration of the colonial period as an apocalypse.

The book creates significant value for readers outside of the closely related fields of archaeology and ethnohistory in the Southeast. For example, considerations of the Catawba, Cherokee and Chickasaw are related backwards in time to Cahokia and the Mississippian period, northward in space to the Haudenosaunee, and across cultural and economic gulfs to the English, Spanish and French traders, missionaries and settlements. The combination of archaeological and historical information the book brings together is never overpowering, but the complications associated with defining each of these groups is made clear, in some cases down to the level of an individual village. The sophistication of Cobb's definition and discussion of landscape is welcome, in particular the argument against an artificial distinction between landscape and built environment. While the book brings in concepts from the study of the built environment, environmental reconstruction, persistent places and the possibility of studying their non-materialist meanings, it is made clear that the focus remains on economic and political changes.

For example, speaking on the importance of the deerskin trade to the transformation of Native American economies and politics, Cobb's analysis takes seriously the relationship between environmental factors like land use and deer population. The discussion of how crops from the Eastern Hemisphere were not particularly important to Indigenous North American agriculture, at least not at first, is a similar example in which the social and environmental meet in a surprising way. Other examples include a discussion in Chapter 6 of the Vacant Quarter and 1450 CE as a possible climatic turning point in Indigenous history. In the Southeast, fire regimes and their legacy are particularly important to study in long-term context, given the trajectory of fire management in the US and around the world.

On occasion, archaeological studies in the Americas, and ethnographic understandings of living people were framed in a state of shocking ignorance of history. This book illustrates clearly the utility of historical consciousness to anthropologists and archaeologists. It does so on two levels, the first and more obvious being the historical study of Indigenous peoples through the eighteenth century. The second is the survey of structural history and other historical engagements with Indigenous societies and their relationships with colonial powers.

One of the few questions that gave me pause (perhaps out of ignorance) was a lack of explicit engagement with Indigenous scholarship. Although the narrative is keenly aware of the importance of Indigenous points of view in the retelling and analysis of history, the point of view remains on the outside. To a non-specialist, a more detailed discussion of the history of Indigenous scholarship, and its integration (or lack thereof) into the anthropological literature, would have been welcome, as well as prospects for the future. In the early chapters, the problem of migration (much argued in nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropology) is discussed, but an underinformed reader remains unaware how these movements of people across the pre-Columbian Southeast are important (or unimportant) to people living today.

The concluding chapter takes "Apocalypse Now and Then" for its theme, and highlights what seems like the central question for the anthropology and history of this or any transition related to the Conquest: if the sixteenth century was so calamitous as to destroy 80 or 95 percent of the population of the Southeast, then how...