In The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American Landscapes of the Colonial Era, Charles R. Cobb takes on the challenge of constructing a broad (rather than grand) historical narrative that also details the region-wide transformations enacted by and on Native American communities of the southeastern United States before and during the colonial era (ca. AD 1300–1800). In pursuing this challenge, Cobb synthesizes nearly three decades of recent archaeological, ethnohistorical, and historical research.

As the title suggests, Cobb draws insight from the scholarship of landscapes—particularly works emphasizing political economy—to frame the ways in which European mercantile systems and colonial power relationships drew Native American communities into an increasingly global Atlantic world. He also engages with the recent work of ethnohistorians and archaeologists who highlight the strategies that Native American communities enacted while negotiating life during the colonial era. These case studies populate Cobb’s landscapes, and collectively, they help give them a sense of motion through the complex interplay of specific community histories.

Motion—or, more precisely, population movement—forms a core theme of this book, because Native American communities regularly used migration as a strategy to ameliorate the turmoil caused by colonialism. The other core theme of the book is transformation, and Cobb offers the reader a new perspective on this concept. Rather than relying on a simple pre–European contact / post–European contact dichotomy, he presents change as a complex unfolding of multiple ecological, economic, and political developments that were experienced unevenly by communities across the Southeast for centuries before and after the arrival of European settlers.

In chapter 2, Cobb establishes the cultural/historical and theoretical contexts of his study. He provides an admittedly normative but useful description of Mississippian societies and broadly outlines and compares the motives and goals of Spanish, English, and French colonial projects. Cobb also presents his theoretical approach to the study, which he calls “neohistorical anthropology.” This framework focuses on relationships of power and inequality through the integration of both materialist (sensu historical anthropology) and ideological (sensu postcolonial theory) perspectives.

Cobb focuses on relationships between landscape and culture in chapter 3, building an understanding of how Native American communities constructed place through the incorporation of politics, economy, religion, and experience. He sets up this discussion by juxtaposing two categories of landscape elements: persistent versus portable places and spaces. Cobb argues that the latter category would become more important to Native American communities as they used migration as a way to navigate the chaotic landscape of the colonial era. For these communities, the built environment, which consisted of routinized spatial arrangements of structures and features, was replicable and could materialize essential social, economic, political, and religious meanings. Cobb also reminds readers that landscapes do not consist solely of spaces and places; instead, he regards them as materializations of social, political, and economic networks in which connections among spaces and places (e.g., trails and rivers) are essential.

In chapters 4 and 5, Cobb shifts attention to the cultural processes surrounding the displacements and population movements that shaped colonial-era Native American landscapes. He emphasizes both population movements’ continuity with those of the preceding Mississippian period and the importance of exploring diversity within this broad category. In parsing diversity, Cobb identifies three types of movement: serial migration, diaspora, and migration to frontiers. For each type, he offers case studies of specific groups, detailing both the circumstances that precipitated population movements and their outcomes. The cases include Yamasees for serial migration, Natchez and Shawnees for diaspora, and the numerous groups who moved into frontier regions of the upper Susquehanna River Valley in Pennsylvania and the middle Savannah River Valley along the border of modern Georgia and South Carolina. Cobb presents emplacement as a complementary process to displacement in describing the various strategies groups employed to adapt to life in a new location. Here, he is particularly interested in the ways groups used cultural practices to construct place and identity and the heterogenous outcomes that resulted. Cobb offers the reader case studies of three variations of emplacement: coalescence (Creeks and Cherokees), colonization (Chickasaws), and the myriad groups who were drawn into the Spanish mission system in Florida.

Cobb then shifts perspective to explore the historical and political ecology of Native American landscapes. Taking a longitudinal approach, Cobb compares the political/ecological trajectory of Mississippian societies with that of colonial-era communities, pointing to aspects of continuity and transformation. He notes that displaced groups often moved to areas with similar ecological characteristics as their ancestral homelands and that they continued to rely heavily on maize and nuts while largely avoiding the plants and animals introduced by Europeans (with a few exceptions). Cobb also outlines how the deerskin trade became the catalyst for far-reaching transformations—the rise of consumerism, shifting gender roles, changing architectural styles, settlement pattern shifts, and changes in region-wide deer populations and plant communities.

Cobb concludes with a convincing argument to replace the common framework for studying colonialism as one “sea change” event with the idea that colonialism was an ongoing process of transformations for Native American communities—a process consisting of multiple, interlinked threshold (or pivot) points that were experienced variably by different groups across the Southeast.

Although this work provides a much-needed synthesis of current research in the US Southeast, it contributes far more as a roadmap for how to study colonial landscapes. This book will prove very useful for readers interested in a broad historical narrative of Native American communities in the Southeast during the colonial era and for scholars exploring ways to frame studies of materiality and landscape under conditions of colonialism.