Arrival and Emplacement

This chapter outlines how emplacement was an important complement to displacement as a Native American adaption to continuing incursions of colonial powers. As with displacement, several key strategies of emplacement, or socially producing place, are explored. These include coalescence and colonization. As the late 1600s and 1700s progressed, the ongoing patterns of displacement and emplacement lent the southeastern landscape an increasingly fractal quality. Towns themselves may have incorporated distinct enclaves of newcomers, while nominal culture regions could contain discrete settlements of migrants forced out of shatter zones. By the mid- to late 1700s, the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Seminoles, Catawbas, Creeks, and other surviving Native American communities of the Southeast were all multidimensional coalescent entities. In addition, the Franciscan mission system in the Spanish colony of La Florida is presented as a distinct trajectory of emplacement in the Southeast.

A Hint of Things to Come …

This chapter provides an overview of landscape studies in archaeology, particularly as practiced in the southeastern United States. There is an extended discussion justifying historical anthropology as an important point of departure for this study, in particular because of its usefulness for exploring processes of colonialism. The chapter provides summaries of the major Native American groups and European powers that appear in the remainder of the volume. Generally speaking, the three major European players, or the Spanish, English, and French had different goals and methods of colonization. These methods cumulatively spurred a highly ramified history of landscape transformations for Native Americans. The chapter’s approach resonates well with post-colonial approaches that attempt to decolonize the past by removing Europeans as the primary lens by which we view the actions of Indigenous peoples. Working under rubrics such as “Native-lived colonialism” and “decolonizing the past,” archaeologists increasingly are seeking to integrate European texts, the archaeological record, oral histories, and the perspectives of Native peoples to try and achieve a plural perspective on past lifeways.

Introduction

This brief section emphasizes the importance of migration in understandings of landscape under conditions of colonialism. By relying on the notion of positionality, the author explains why this topic is of personal as well as professional interest. The introduction and work as a whole reflect a historical perspective that emphasizes the concrete daily lives of Native Americans during the colonial era as conveyed through the landscape. The structural unfolding of colonialism, mercantilism, and capitalism serve as a backdrop to small-scale histories ranging from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean, which fail to come together as a tidy, linear history. It was one where the larger ambitions of colonial powers were leveraged, countered, and thwarted not only by Native Americans, but by the very colonial representatives who were meant to carry them out. The introduction also defines some key terms used in the book and clarifies why certain case studies were used and others excluded.

Apocalypse Now and Then?

The concluding chapter critically evaluates a received wisdom in the literature that pre-European contact polities collapsed from the impacts of colonialism. An argument is made for a more nuanced perspective on major cultural transformations and a closer interrogation of the implications of terms like collapse. As an alternative, this chapter forwards the thesis that, rather than a single collapse, Native American landscapes underwent a series of major alterations through the colonial era. These were linked to demographic decline and conflict; the emergence of the consumer revolution; the manipulation of debt by colonial and American governments; and the development of capitalism. As a concluding point, the author argues that Native American cultures successfully navigated these changes even as they were transformed by them.

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.

Migration and Displacement

This chapter makes the case that displacement was one of the major responses by Native Americans to the encroachment of European powers. It first considers the nature of Native American movements in the Southeast during the centuries immediately prior to the arrival of the first Spaniards in Florida. Then, displacement is further broken down into several categories of population relocation: serial migration, diaspora, and flows to frontiers. Reasons for displacement vary greatly: destructive wars, depredations of slave trading, and incursions of colonial settlements undermined settlement stability to a historically unprecedented degree, while perceived opportunities provided yet another major stimulus for migration and relocation, as families and towns moved to locations advantageous for trade, travel, and communication. This examination of population movement opens social, environmental, and political discussions concerning the paths of Native American peoples in North America.

From Cussita to Bears Ears

This chapter explores Native American experiential views of the landscape. Two categories of culturally important ways of constructing landscape histories are put forth: first, persistent places, as regularly visited locations; and second, portable places, as ways of moving important elements of the built environment. Persistent places are locations on the landscape that embody long-term and variable histories of residence, visitation, commemoration, and memory. On the other hand, portable places have witnessed so many groups pushed or pulled out of their territories and often buffeted across the Southeast without much respite that many traditional aspects of the landscape may have been lost—if not from memory, at least from routine encounters. Lacking the familiar touchstones found in a stable topographic setting, portable places become entities that, regardless of place, manifest the essence of a people. The chapter closes with a discussion of the practical and ideological importance of different modes of travel.