“History,” “Prehistory,” and Landscapes of Practice

The primary legitimate distinction between history and prehistory has always been methodological, based on differing degrees of direct or indirect access to what people did and thought in the past. Moreover, if we view culture as an emergent phenomenon that is manifested through the socially contextualized actions and thoughts of individuals over the course of their lifetimes, then culture has always had both historical and processual dimensions. This chapter explores archaeological approaches to using the material traces of collective individual practices as the cumulative result of individual and social histories and processes at varying temporal, spatial, and social scales.

Becoming and Descending

Over the course of the discipline, archaeological investigations have toggled between history and process, with the current emphasis being increasingly placed on historical aspects. Rather than seeing this as a choice to make, Cook agrees with those that see both as being necessary to understand the full dimensions of the human problems we investigate. Cook presents a Fort Ancient/Mississippian culture case study that explores various dimensions of this research philosophy. This is followed by a discussion that explores the theoretical toggling that seems to occur more so as studies that emphasize one extreme end of the historical-processual continuum seem to be exhausted.

Histories of Greater Cahokian Assemblages

Uncovering ancient Native American histories requires more than considering people, places, and events. It entails recognizing the full assemblage of human and nonhuman agents, forces, powers, affects and atmospheres—and how such were entangled with each other. Uncovering these histories requires considering the processes that drove them, but more, it requires recognizing places and things that particularly resonated because of special powers and vibrancies, that evoked powerful human responses. This requires paying attention to what the people we study believed and recognized, information accessible through material assemblages and oral histories. Alt considers Cahokian assemblages—mounds, caves, water, fire, stone, clay, human and nonhuman persons—to explore how history can be enriched and altered by historicizing an expanded assemblage.

Continuing the Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology

Two prominent archaeologists utilizing history in their archaeology offer thoughts on the essays and on the historical turn in Southeastern archaeology considering especially the themes of historical process, historical consciousness, and historical ontology

Centering the Margins of “History”

Not long ago, our “historical” narratives concerning seventeenth- and eighteenth-century southeastern Indian communities read like colonial maps with neatly depicted “Tribal” territories and towns. Like those maps, the narratives presented a timeless “history” for groups whose identities were rooted to specific locations. This chapter traces a shift in our perspective as we have grown to appreciate the mutability and fluidity of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century colonial landscape. I explore artifact data from a number of sites to identify material traces of the social “reshuffling” that unfolded during this period—a process materialized as "improvised" diaspora communities.

The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology

Southeastern archaeologists increasingly use an historical approach to ask fresh questions and open up new ways of understanding the deep past of the Native South. Archaeologists now see that processes were certainly at play shaping the ancient past, but that it was also a product of long- and short-term events, people making choices, migration, coalescence, ethnogenesis, ideology, place making, memory constructs, contingency, and structures of the longue durée, among other things. In this introductory essay, the authors examine the historical turn in archaeology; explore how re-conceiving of the ancient past not as “prehistory” but “history” fundamentally reshapes our understanding of pre-colonial indigenous people; and iterate some of the fundamentals underlying this historical turn.

Deep Time on the Eternal River

Archaic hunter-gatherers of the St. Johns River Valley were once considered the history-less multitudes par excellence, who flourished for millennia with little change. However, mortuary traditions, object itineraries, biographies of place, and footprints of landscape terraforming reveal how Archaic communities actively cultivated associations with ancient social landscapes whose relevance was deeply imbricated with the cosmology of watery underworlds. In this chapter, I consider how Archaic communities uncovered and re-created their own histories as modes of social change. Even at the scale of the southeast, communities leveraged their historical entanglements with a sacred geography to structure and provide rationale to gatherings.

From Small Histories to Big History on the Woodland Period Gulf Coast

The “historical turn” in the archaeology of the Woodland period Gulf Coast of the Southeastern United States began several decades ago, as archaeologists began to move beyond relatively static regional cultural histories to develop detailed chronologies of several of the region’s most prominent sites, demonstrating in fine detail the manner in which communities were dynamically transformed over short intervals. However, these local chronologies have remained largely disconnected from each other—more akin to biography than history. We draw these accumulated biographies together to illustrate how they are beginning to reveal a series of concordant changes across the region, including a sudden restructuring of communities in the sixth and seventh centuries. Although some details remain unclear, we are beginning to understand this “Weeden Islandization” as “big history” that involved the migration of people, materials, ideas, and practices across large areas.

An Archaeology of Native American Placemaking in the Southern Appalachians

Archaeology contributes material perspectives and temporal dimensions to the study of placemaking. This chapter explores relationships between people and place in Native American town areas of the southern Appalachians. How did these towns situate themselves within the southern Appalachian landscape during the period just before and after European contact? How did practices of placemaking shape Native American responses to encounters and entanglements with Spanish conquistadors and English traders and military expeditions? As evident from archaeology, oral tradition, and place names, many places within the landscape of the southern Appalachians were sources of resilience and stability and points of resistance to change.