Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone

The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South

Robbie Ethridge, Sheri M. Shuck-Hall

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780803217591
• eBook ISBN: 9780803226142
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Native American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

During the two centuries following European contact, the world of late prehistoric Mississippian chiefdoms collapsed and Native communities there fragmented, migrated, coalesced, and reorganized into new and often quite different societies. The editors of this volume, Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall, argue that such a period and region of instability and regrouping constituted a "shatter zone." In this anthology, archaeologists, ethnohistorians, and anthropologists analyze the shatter zone created in the colonial Southby examining the interactions of American Indians and European colonists. The forces that destabilized the region included especially the frenzied commercial traffic in Indian slaves conducted by both Europeans and Indians, which decimated several southern Native communities; the inherently fluid political and social organization ofprecontact Mississippian chiefdoms; and the widespread epidemics that spread across the South. Using examples from a range of Indian communities—Muskogee, Catawba, Iroquois, Alabama, Coushatta, Shawnee, Choctaw, Westo, and Natchez—the contributors assess the shatter zone region as a whole, and the varied ways in which Native peoples wrestled with an increasingly unstable world and worked to reestablish order.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone
• 2 Events as Seen from the North: The Iroquois and Colonial Slavery
• 3 From Refugees to Slave Traders: The Transformation of the Westo Indians
• 4 “Caryinge awaye their Corne and Children”: The Effects of Westo Slave Raids on the Indians of the Lower South
• 5 Catawba Coalescence and the Shattering of the Carolina Piedmont, 1540–1675
• 6 “Indians Refusing to Carry Burdens”: Understanding the Success of Catawba Political, Military, and Settlement Strategies in Colonial Carolina
• 7 “The Greatest Travelers in America”: Shawnee Survival in the Shatter Zone
• 8 Tracing the Origins of the Early Creeks, 1050–1700 CE
• 9 Alabama and Coushatta Diaspora and Coalescence in the Mississippian Shatter Zone
• 10 Violence in a Shattered World
• 11 Razing Florida: The Indian Slave Trade and the Devastation of Spanish Florida, 1659–1715
• 12 Shattered and Infected: Epidemics and the Origins of the Yamasee War, 1696–1715
• 13 Choctaws at the Border of the Shatter Zone: Spheres of Exchange and Spheres of Social Value
• 14 Shatter Zone Shock Waves along the Lower Mississippi
• 15 Picking Up the Pieces: Natchez Coalescence in the Shatter Zone
• Afterword: Some Thoughts on Further Work
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index