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Discover the deep cultural roots of Southern cuisine through archaeology.
 
Understanding and explaining societal rules surrounding food and foodways have been the foci of anthropological studies since the early days of the discipline. Baking, Bourbon, and Black Drink: Foodways Archaeology in the American Southeast, however, is the first collection devoted exclusively to southeastern foodways analyzed through archaeological perspectives. These essays examine which foods were eaten and move the discussion of foodstuffs into the sociocultural realm of why, how, and when they were eaten.
 
Editors Tanya M. Peres and Aaron Deter-Wolf present a volume that moves beyond basic understandings, applying new methods or focusing on subjects not widely discussed in the Southeast to date. Chapters are arranged using the dominant research themes of feasting, social and political status, food security and persistent places, and foodways histories. Contributors provide in-depth examination of specific food topics such as bone marrow, turkey, Black Drink, bourbon, earth ovens, and hominy.
 
Contributors bring a broad range of expertise to the collection, resulting in an expansive look at all of the steps taken from field to table, including procurement, production, cooking, and consumption, all of which have embedded cultural meanings and traditions. The scope of the volume includes the diversity of research specialties brought to bear on the topic of foodways as well as the temporal and regional breadth and depth, the integration of multiple lines of evidence, and, in some cases, the reinvestigation of well-known sites with new questions and new data.

The writings of a sixteenth-century advocate who challenged empire in defense of Indigenous peoples.

With the exception of Christopher Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas is arguably the most notable figure of the Encounter Age. He is remembered principally as the creator of the Black Legend, as well as the protector of American Indians. He was one of the pioneers of the human rights movement, and a Christian activist who invoked law and Biblical scripture to challenge European colonialism in the great age of the Encounter. He was also one of the first and most thorough chroniclers of the conquest, and a biographer who saved the diary of Columbus’s first voyage for posterity by transcribing it in his History of the Indies before the diary was lost.

Bartolomé de las Casas and the Defense of Amerindian Rights: A Brief History with Documents provides the most wide-ranging and concise anthology of Las Casas’s writings, in translation, ever made available. It contains not only excerpts from his most well-known texts, but also his largely unavailable writings on political philosophy and law, and addresses the underappreciated aspects of his thought. Fifteen of the twenty-six documents are entirely new translations of Las Casas’s writings, a number of them appearing in English for the first time.

This volume focuses on his historical, political, and legal writings that address the deeply conflicted and violent sixteenth-century encounter between Europeans and indigenous peoples of the Americas. It also presents Las Casas as a more comprehensive and systematic philosophical and legal thinker than he is typically given credit for. The introduction by Lawrence A. Clayton and David M. Lantigua places these writings into a synthetic whole, tracing his advocacy for indigenous peoples throughout his career. By considering Las Casas’s ideas, actions, and even regrets in tandem, readers will understand the historical dynamics of Spanish imperialism more acutely within the social-political context of the times.
 

WINNER OF THE ANNE B. & JAMES B. MCMILLAN PRIZE IN SOUTHERN HISTORY
WINNER OF THE ERMINIE WHEELER-VOEGELIN BOOK AWARD
WINNER OF THE BERSHIRE CONFERENCE OF WOMEN HISTORIANS BOOK AWARD
WINNER OF THE GEORGE C. ROGERS, JR. AWARD FROM THE SOUTH CAROLINA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The story of Catawba women who experienced sweeping changes to their world but held onto traditional customs to create and preserve a Catawba identity and build a nation.

Brooke M. Bauer’s Becoming Catawba: Catawba Indian Women and Nation-Building, 1540–1840 is the first book-length study of the role Catawba women played in creating and preserving a cohesive tribal identity over three centuries of colonization and cultural turmoil. Bauer, a citizen of the Catawba Indian Nation of South Carolina, weaves ethnohistorical methodologies, family history, cultural context, and the Catawba language together to generate an internal perspective on the Catawbas’ history and heritage in the area now known as the Carolina Piedmont.

This unique and important study examines the lives and legacies of women who executed complex decision-making and diplomacy to navigate shifting frameworks of kinship, land ownership, and cultural production in dealings with colonial encroachments, white settlers, and Euro-American legal systems and governments from the mid-sixteenth century to the early nineteenth century. Personified in the figure of Sally New River, a Catawba cultural leader to whom 500 remaining acres of occupied tribal lands were deeded on behalf of the community in 1796 and which she managed until her death in 1821, Bauer reveals how women worked to ensure the survival of the Catawba people and their Catawba identity, an effort that resulted in a unified nation.

Bauer’s approach is primarily ethnohistorical, although it draws on a number of interdisciplinary strategies. In particular, Bauer uses “upstreaming,” a critical strategy that moves toward the period under study by using present-day community members’ connections to historical knowledge—for example, family histories and oral traditions—to interpret primary-source data. Additionally, Bauer employs archaeological data and material culture as a means of performing feminist recuperation, filling the gaps and silences left by the records, newspapers, and historical accounts as primarily written by and for white men. Ultimately, Becoming Catawba effects a welcome intervention at the intersections of Native, women’s, and Southern history, expanding the diversity and modes of experience in the fraught, multifaceted cultural environment of the early American South.
 

A foundational document, Black Hawk: An Autobiography is both an unsparing record of America's genocide against Native American peoples and the moving self-portrait of an extraordinary man.

Winner of the Beatrice Medicine Award for Scholarship in American Indian Studies

From the marginalia of their readers to the social and cultural means of their production, books bear the imprint of our humanity. Embodying the marks, traces, and scars of colonial survival, Indigenous books are contested spaces. A constellation of nontextual components surrounded Native American–authored publications of the long nineteenth century, shaping how these books were read and understood—including illustrations, typefaces, explanatory prefaces, appendices, copyright statements, author portraits, and more.

Centering Indigenous writers, Book Anatomy explores works from John Rollin Ridge, Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins, Pretty Shield, and D’Arcy McNickle published between 1854 and 1936. In examining critical moments of junction between Indigenous books and a mainstream literary marketplace, Amy Gore argues that the reprints, editions, and paratextual elements of Indigenous books matter: they embody a frontline of colonization in which Native authors battle the public perception and reception of Indigenous books, negotiate representations of Indigenous bodies, and fight for authority and ownership over their literary work.

Common understandings drawn from biblical references, literature, and art portray deserts as barren places that are far from God and spiritual sustenance. In our own time, attention focuses on the rigors of climate change in arid lands and the perils of the desert in the northern Mexican borderlands for migrants seeking shelter and a new life.

Bountiful Deserts foregrounds the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in the arid lands of northwestern Mexico, for whom the desert was anything but barren or empty. Instead, they nurtured and harvested the desert as a bountiful and sacred space. Drawing together historical texts and oral testimonies, archaeology, and natural history, author Cynthia Radding develops the relationships between people and plants and the ways that Indigenous people sustained their worlds before European contact through the changes set in motion by Spanish encounters, highlighting the long process of colonial conflicts and adaptations over more than two centuries. This work reveals the spiritual power of deserts by weaving together the cultural practices of historical peoples and contemporary living communities, centered especially on the Yaqui/Yoeme and Mayo/Yoreme.

Radding uses the tools of history, anthropology, geography, and ecology to paint an expansive picture of Indigenous worlds before and during colonial encounters. She re-creates the Indigenous worlds in both their spiritual and material realms, bringing together the analytical dimension of scientific research and the wisdom of oral traditions in its exploration of different kinds of knowledge about the natural world.

Published in cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

The stories colonizers tell about Diné people represent them as adaptors, uncontrollable, and unruly. These wounding narratives justify the displacement and dispossession of Diné people, masking the ongoing violence of settler colonialism. 

Bundle: Life, Stories, and Hope Across Diné Worlds challenges and dismantles these harmful depictions. By shifting the paradigm away from anthropological lenses, this book offers an exploration of bundling: the active, physical, spiritual, and ideological practice through which Diné people assemble stories, tools, and knowledge. From world shifts detailed in oral narratives to the present deadly structures of colonization, Diné people have long relied on their bundled knowledge systems to sustain their presence across worlds and time. 

Bundle is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand Diné resistance, hope, and worlding. Rather than studying Diné life from the outside, it prioritizes Diné ways of knowing and being to develop bundling as a theory of continuance. For readers invested in decolonization, place-making, and storytelling, Bundle provides an indispensable roadmap for how Diné people continue even in the face of domination.