The first work to apply an events-based approach to the analysis of pivotal developments in the pre-Columbian Southeast

Across the social sciences, gradualist evolutionary models of historical dynamics are giving way to explanations focused on the punctuated and contingent “events” through which history is actually experienced. The Archaeology of Events is the first book-length work that systematically applies this new eventful approach to major developments in the pre-Columbian Southeast.
Traditional accounts of pre-Columbian societies often portray them as “cold” and unchanging for centuries or millennia. Events-based analyses have opened up archaeological discourse to the more nuanced and flexible idea of context-specific, rapidly transpiring, and broadly consequential historical “events” as catalysts of cultural change.

The Archaeology of Events, edited by Zackary I. Gilmore and Jason M. O’Donoughue, considers a variety of perspectives on the nature and scale of events and their role in historical change. These perspectives are applied to a broad range of archeological contexts stretching across the Southeast and spanning more than 7,000 years of the region’s pre-Columbian history. New data suggest that several of this region’s most pivotal historical developments, such as the founding of Cahokia, the transformation of Moundville from urban center to vacated necropolis, and the construction of Poverty Point’s Mound A, were not protracted incremental processes, but rather watershed moments that significantly altered the long-term trajectories of indigenous Southeastern societies.

In addition to exceptional occurrences that impacted entire communities or peoples, southeastern archaeologists are increasingly recognizing the historical importance of localized, everyday events, such as building a house, crafting a pot, or depositing shell. The essays collected by Gilmore and O’Donoughue show that small-scale events can make significant contributions to the unfolding of broad, regional-scale historical processes and to the reproduction or transformation of social structures.

The Archaeology of Events is the first volume to explore the archaeological record of events in the Southeastern United States, the methodologies that archaeologists bring to bear on this kind of research, and considerations of the event as an important theoretical concept.
 

Changes in Native American communities as they adapted to advancing Europeans.

 

This volume investigates the use of deer, deerskins, and nonlocal goods in the period from A.D. 1400 to 1700 to gain a comprehensive understanding of historic-era cultural changes taking place within Native American communities in the southern Appalachian Highlands. In the 1600s, hunting deer to obtain hides for commercial trade evolved into a substantial economic enterprise for many Native Americans in the Middle Atlantic and Southeast.  An overseas market demand for animal hides and furs imported from the Americas, combined with the desire of infant New World colonies to find profitable export commodities, provided a new market for processed deerskins as well as new sources of valued nonlocal goods.  This new trade in deerskins created a reorganization of the priorities of native hunters that initiated changes in native trade networks, political alliances, gender relations, and cultural belief systems.  

Through research on faunal remains and mortuary assemblages, Lapham tracks both the products Native Americans produced for colonial trade--deerskins and other furs--as well as those items received in exchange--European and native prestige goods that end up in burial contexts. Zooarchaeological analyses provide insights into subsistence practices, deer-hunting strategies, and deer-hide production activities, while an examination of mortuary practices contributes information on the use of the nonlocal goods acquired through trade in deerskins. This study reveals changes in economic organization and mortuary practices that provide new insights into how participation in the colonial deerskin trade initially altered Native American social relations and political systems.