Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South by Robbie Ethridge


Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South
Title : Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0803217595
ISBN-10 : 9780803217591
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 536
Publication : First published November 1, 2009

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 South by 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 of precontact 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.

Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South Reviews

  • Jonna Higgins-Freese

    I hadn't been aware of the extensive Indian slave trade post-contact, or of the extent of the Mississippian polities/chieftains/kingdoms across the south.

    "The Mississippian shatter zone, as I have defined it elsewhere, was a large region of instability in eastern North America that existed from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries and was created by the combined conditions of the structural instability of the Mississippian world and the inabilty of Native polities to withstand the full force of colonialism; the introduction of Old World pathogens and the subsequent serial disease episodes and loss of life; the inauguration of a nascent capitalist economic system by Europeans through a commercial trade in animal skins and especially in Indian slaves, whom other Indians procured and sold to European buyers; and the intensification and spread of violence and warfare through the Indian slave trade and particularly through the emergence of militaristic Native slaving societies who held control of the European trade" (2).

    Early Mississippian (900-1200)
    Middle Mississippian (1200-1500)
    Late Mississippian (1500-1700)