Forging Southeastern Identities: Social Archaeology and Ethnohistory of the Mississippian to Early Historic South, a groundbreaking collection of ten essays, covers a broad expanse of time—from the ninth to the nineteenth centuries—and focuses on a common theme of identity. These essays represent the various methods used by esteemed scholars today to study how Native Americans in the distant past created new social identities when old ideas of the self were challenged by changes in circumstance or by historical contingencies.
 
Archaeologists, anthropologists, and folklorists working in the Southeast have always recognized the region’s social diversity; indeed, the central purpose of these disciplines is to study peoples overlooked by the mainstream. Yet the ability to define and trace the origins of a collective social identity—the means by which individuals or groups align themselves, always in contrast to others—has proven to be an elusive goal. Here, editors Gregory A. Waselkov and Marvin T. Smith champion the relational identification and categorical identification processes, taken from sociological theory, as effective analytical tools.
 
Taking up the challenge, the contributors have deployed an eclectic range of approaches to establish and inform an overarching theme of identity. Some investigate shell gorgets, textiles, shell trade, infrastructure, specific sites, or plant usage. Others focus on the edges of the Mississippian world or examine colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. A final chapter considers the adaptive malleability of historical legend in the telling and hearing of slave narratives.

Gregory A. Waselkov is the author of Old Mobile Archaeology and the award-winning A Conquering Spirit: Fort Mims and the Redstick War of 1813–1814. He is a coauthor of Archéologie de l’Amérique coloniale française, which won Le Prix Lionel-Groulx. Waselkov serves as president of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference and was the former editor of the journal Southeastern Archaeology. He is a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Archaeological Studies at the University of South Alabama.
 
Marvin T. Smith is the author of more than seventy scholarly publications, including The Archaeology of Aboriginal Culture Change in the Interior Southeast: Depopulation during the Early Historic Period and Coosa: The Rise and Fall of a Southeastern Mississippian Chiefdom. He is a professor of anthropology at Valdosta State University in Georgia.

" An archaeological truism is that artifacts do not reveal historic identities or the identities of the creators. However, materials may identify changes in ethnic groups and/or societies occupying a particular locale. Waselkov and Smith assembled 13 scholars to interrogate the question of changing identities in the Mississippian and early historic South. The collective conclusion is that material goods and historical records do indicate changes in identities and infer societal changes. [ . . . ] The chapters are mines of information for specialists  . . . Recommended."
—Choice