Although scholars have long recognized the mythic status of bears in Indigenous North American societies of the past, this is the first volume to synthesize the vast amount of archaeological and historical research on the topic. Bears charts the special relationship between the American black bear and humans in eastern Native American cultures across thousands of years. These essays draw on zooarchaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic evidence from nearly 300 archaeological sites from Quebec to the Gulf of Mexico. Contributors explore the ways bears have been treated as something akin to another kind of human-in the words of anthropologist Irving Hallowell, "other than human persons"-in Algonquian, Cherokee, Iroquois, Meskwaki, Creek, and many other Native cultures. Case studies focus on bear imagery in Native art and artifacts; the religious and economic significance of bears and bear products such as meat, fat, oil, and pelts; bears in Native worldviews, kinship systems, and cosmologies; and the use of bears as commodities in transatlantic trade. The case studies in Bears demonstrate that bears were not only a source of food, but were also religious, economic, and political icons within Indigenous cultures. This volume convincingly portrays the black bear as one of the most socially significant species in Native eastern North America. A volume in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series

Southeastern Native American forms of domestic architecture underwent multiple transitions between the mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries. In Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast, Gregory A. Waselkov and ten colleagues track the origins of Native American cabins, structures that incorporated a range of features borrowed from indigenous post-in ground building traditions, Euroamerican horizontal notched-log construction, and elements introduced by Africans and African Americans. Grounded in archaeological investigation, their essays illuminate the distinctive cabin forms developed by various southeastern Native groups, including the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Catawba peoples. In a rapidly changing social, economic, and political landscape at the frontiers of an expansionist United States, the log cabin, a northern European house form, proved equally adaptable to the needs of settlers, slaves, and Native peoples. Each found ways to make log cabins their own. Beneath these deceptively simple hewn facades, indigenous principles of correctness guided southeastern Indians' uses of interior cabin space, creations of raised clay hearths, and maintenance of pits that gave occupants access to the regenerative properties of the Beneath World. The chapters in this volume make important contributions toward a better understanding of houses and households in the Native Southeast by marshalling new data, methods, and theory to address an important but understudied phenomenon.

Considered a classic study of southeastern Indians, "Powhatan's Mantle" demonstrates how ethnohistory, demography, archaeology, anthropology, and cartography can be brought together in fresh and meaningful ways to illuminate life in the early South. In a series of provocative original essays, a dozen leading scholars show how diverse Native Americans interacted with newcomers from Europe and Africa during the three hundred years of dramatic change beginning in the early sixteenth century.
For this new and expanded edition, the original contributors have revisited their subjects to offer further insights based on years of additional scholarship. The book includes four new essays, on calumet ceremonialism, social diversity in French Louisiana, the gendered nature of Cherokee agriculture, and the ideology of race among Creek Indians. The result is a volume filled with detailed information and challenging, up-to-date reappraisals reflecting the latest interdisciplinary research, ranging from Indian mounds and map symbolism to diplomatic practices and social structure, written to interest fellow scholars and informed general readers.

William Bartram traveled throughout the American Southeast from 1773-1776. He occupies a unique place as an American Enlightenment explorer, naturalist, writer, and artist whose work was widely admired in his time and thereafter. Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and other leading romantics found inspiration in his pages. Bartram's most famous work, Travels has remained in print since the first publication of the book in 1791. However, his writings on Indians have received less attention than they deserve. This volume contains all of Bartram's known writings on Native Americans: a new version of "Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians," originally edited by E. G. Squier and first published in 1853; a previously unpublished essay, "Some Hints and Observations Concerning the Civilization of the Indians, or Aborigines of America"; and extensive excerpts from Travels. These documents are among the most valuable accounts we have of the Creeks and Seminoles in the last half of the eighteenth century. Several illustrations by Bartram are also included. The editors provide information on the history of these documents and supply extensive annotations. The book opens with a biographical essay on Bartram and concludes with a thorough evaluation of his contributions to southeastern Indian ethnohistory, anthropology, and archaeology. The editors have identified and corrected a number of errors found in the extant literature concerning Bartram and his writings.