Bears, Bear Grounds, and Bovines in the Lower Southeast

In the late eighteenth century, U.S. Indian agent Benjamin Hawkins observed that Creeks maintained “beloved bear-grounds” near towns to protect bear habitat. However, Hawkins also noted, “as the cattle increase and the bear decrease, they are hunted in common.” Hawkins’ observations suggest a relationship between the frequency of the two species, and zooarchaeological assemblages from Creek towns support this hypothesis. A frequency index of bear and cattle remains indicate that as cattle increased over time, bear decreased precipitously. Creek hunters initially despised cattle, believing that beef would make the consumer slow and dim-witted. However, with the decline of the deerskin trade, Creek hunters turned to animal husbandry. The best graze for cattle was found in the “beloved bear grounds” and cattle husbandry quickly devastated native bear habitats. By the end of the eighteenth century, cattle displaced bears from their native habitat, and replaced bears in Creek life.

The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era

This book synthesizes the landscape histories of Native Americans in southeastern North America from the arrival of the Spaniards in the sixteenth century to the first decades of the American Republic. Relying on archaeological data and historical sources, the work outlines the ways in which Native populations accommodated and contested the growing encroachments of colonialism and colonial powers. Traditional landscape practices were greatly transformed by epidemic diseases, chronic warfare, and a widespread slave trade in Indian populations. Research demonstrates that populations adapted to these challenges in two major ways. First, they built on traditional histories of mobility to develop new modes of migration and travel to escape regions of conflict and to gain access to important colonial towns and resources. Second, seeking safety in numbers, Native Americans increasingly formed coalescent communities composed of two or more cultural groups. These coalescent communities evolved into the groups known today as Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, Catawbas, and Seminoles. The study further explores how the evolution of these groups was connected to events and processes of the broader political economy in the Atlantic World, including the rise of plantation slavery, the growth of the deerskin trade, the birth of the consumer revolution, and the emergence of capitalism.

Eruptions and Disruptions

This chapter takes on a long-term perspective on key trends in the historical ecology and political ecology of Native American landscapes during the colonial era. It examines how climate change may have impacted landscape adaptation both prior to and after the arrival of Europeans. There is a detailed overview of Native American plant and animal exploitation, and how subsistence patterns changed from the 1500s to the 1800s.The chapter also devotes considerable attention to the importance of the deerskin trade in Indigenous landscape economies, and the rise of enclosure and private farms following the American Revolution. These trends are explained in terms of transformations in ideological as well as materialist views of the landscape.

The Creek Indians in the Atlantic World

The Creek Indians (Mvskoke) are a nation of Native Peoples recognized by the US federal government today. Historically, though, the Creeks were a multiethnic group of Indigenous Peoples in the Southeast descended from Mississippian societies. European colonialism in the 16th and 17th centuries disrupted Mississippian societies—primarily due to the mortality associated with diseases and the Indian slave trade—and they gradually dispersed throughout the region. Several of these peoples, led by the Muskogean-speaking Abihkas, Tallapoosas, and Apalachicolas, formed a loose coalition of towns during the mid-17th century. The emergent Creek Indians eventually incorporated non-Muskogean groups, such as the Yuchis, Chickasaws, Hitchitis, Natchez, and Apalachees. By the turn of the 18th century, Europeans identified the existence of a Creek Confederacy, a political entity noted for its divisions between Lower and Upper towns. Throughout the 18th century, the Creek Confederacy perfected a strategy of playing Europeans powers—Great Britain, Spain, and France—against one another. Despite being a confederacy of towns, Creek peoples remained distinct from one another. The primary source of identity in the Creek world was the talwa, one’s home community. From political mediation and ceremonial gatherings to hosting the annual Busk festival, one’s town meant everything. Within the town it was the micos, or civil leaders, who spearheaded political life in the Creek world. However, the authority of a mico did not involve coercion but persuasion, which forced town leaders to abide by their community’s will. The authority of a mico also hinged on sustaining a steady flow of trade between his town and Europeans, which revolved around the exchange of deerskins harvested by Creek hunters. This deerskin trade was the basis for the Creeks’ engagement with the Atlantic world. The Confederacy again experienced profound transformations after the American Revolution, when, faced with an expansionist United States. Conflict with the United States varied between restrained acts of violence and outright war, but eventually a new generation of leaders, born of Euro-American and Creek worlds, reimagined the Creek Confederacy. The resulting “Plan of Civilization,” which included everything from a written constitution to adopting racial slavery, was intended to prove that the Creek peoples could become “civilized,” even though such a status came at the expense of the distinct identities that previously defined the Confederacy. Nevertheless, the efforts to convince the United States to accept Creeks on a nation-to-nation basis failed and produced the removal of Creek peoples during the 19th century. Today, though, despite centuries of colonialism, the Creek (Muscogee) peoples continue to adapt to the world around them, whether in Oklahoma, Alabama, Texas, or Louisiana.

“The Indian Factors: Kinship, Trade, and Authority in the Creek Nation & American South, 1740–1800”

This article explores the lives of the countless “Indian Factors” who straddled Native and European worlds during the eighteenth century. For the most part, these individuals were born of mixed unions between European men and Creek women, and were employed as traders and intermediaries in the deerskin trade and Creek-British politics. However, after the Seven Years’ War, Indian factors triggered a political contest within the Creek Nation, by empowering younger generations of men who challenged micos—the traditional leaders—for authority in their communities. Such tension led to increasing violence with Europeans and contributed to the revolutionary crisis in the South. After 1783, factors again evolved in response to the threat of the United States, this time as voices of Creek sovereignty. All in all, Indian factors embodied the multifaceted definitions and transformative changes that swept the Creek world and the American South during the eighteenth century.

Lives in Objects

The Lives in Objects presents a thoroughly researched and engaging study of the deerskin trade in the colonial Southeast, which is equally attentive to British American and Southeastern Indian cultures of production, distribution, and the consumption of goods. It challenges long-standing assumptions about Native American and European economic cultures in Early America, particularly the dichotomy that other scholars have drawn between gift-giving (associated with native pre-capitalist economies) and commodity exchange (associated with colonial market economies). This interpretation has tended to cast Native Americans as unwitting victims drawn into and made dependent on a trans-Atlantic marketplace. This book complicates that picture by showing how both sides (Southeastern Indian and British American) mixed gift-giving and commodity exchange in the deerskin trade, so much so that Southeastern Indians retained much greater agency as producers and consumers than the standard scholarly interpretation accords them. The result is a much more nuanced view of the trade and its impact on the economic and material lives of Southeastern Indian and British individuals. In this pursuit, this book also complicates the deerskin trade from the British perspective, showing that royal and colonial governments were not as willing to embrace modern free market values as we might assume.

‘Have the Scotch no Claim upon the Cherokees?’ Scots, Indians and Scots Indians in the American South

This chapter traces intermarriages between Scots and Indians and the families they established in the matrilineal indigenous societies of the American Southeast. It examines the roles played by Scots in the deerskin trade and in the British Indian department, and by their children in Creek and Cherokee history. It reconstructs the historic connections between Scots and Cherokees that endured after the Cherokees were forced west by US policies of Indian removal.

Sampling of Data Derived from Historical Documents in Anthropological Research

In response to Joshua Piker's (this issue) comment on our article (Foster and Cohen 2007), we point out that our article was a description of a test of a hypothesis. Piker's (this issue) criticism of our paper is grounded in the differences between historians and anthropological archaeologists. The historic literature that Piker (this issue) cited does not inform about whether or not Creek Indians hunted where we performed the sediment cores. It merely points out that Creek hunters may have hunted with greater frequency elsewhere. But that is irrelevant to our study, which tested whether the eighteenth-century deerskin trade increased the frequency of forest fires in a particular region. Archaeologists will benefit from using historical documents but archaeologists still have to be clear about the potential biases of those interdisciplinary data sources.