Academic “turns” come in various forms, from philosophy's linguistic turn to the recent spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences. Whether a heralded turn involves a truly profound change of course within a field or simply an effort to will one into existence can be difficult to know in the moment. Fortunately for us, the Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology homes in on a genuine and important pivot in the archaeology of the US Southeast—one likely to influence archaeological practice well beyond the region. Edited by Robbie Ethridge and Eric E. Bowne, the volume offers case studies that trace social histories during “prehistory” that were eventful, contingent, and local.
The turn here is largely one away from processual archaeology's evolutionary models of change and toward the idea that Native people made their own histories and understood the relationship between past, present, and future on their own terms. Several archaeologists in the Southeast have quietly held fast to their culture-historical roots, building detailed chronologies around archaeological cultures and phases even as the winds of processual and postprocessual archaeology whipped back and forth. This old-school entrenchment has not necessarily been a bad thing. The focus on local sequences of change drawn from decades of accumulated evidence has left the region's archaeologists well positioned to embrace new approaches foregrounding history. These have included Timothy R. Pauketat's “historical processualism,” Kenneth E. Sassaman's “eventful histories,” Charles Cobb's “deep history,” and Ethridge's “shatter zone,” each of which has laid the groundwork for the historic turn in the archaeology of the Southeast.
Pauketat and Sassaman served as discussants to the conference symposium that generated the edited volume, and they contributed an afterword to the volume. The resulting book offers a clear and cogent outline of the historical turn without dictating a tightly integrated program or paradigm. Instead, the case studies follow myriad pathways to identify historical processes such as migration, coalescence, and ethnogenesis, mostly before the arrival of European settlers in the Americas. The book's introductory chapter by Ethridge, Robin Beck, and Bowne points out that the lack of a uniform approach in archaeology's historical turn can be viewed as a strength, given that diverse approaches are better suited to contingent (i.e., quirky and unpredictable) narratives of historical change.
Several of the case studies seek to understand Native people's own historical consciousness. Working on the St. John's River in northeast Florida, for example, Asa R. Randall offers a powerful interpretation of Archaic period historicity keyed to the riverscape's sacred geography and portals between worlds located along its course. Adopting a “dwelling” perspective, Christopher B. Rodning and Lynne P. Sullivan demonstrate how history in the southern Appalachians was manifested in the rebuilding of domestic structures and through the emplacement of ancestors beneath their floors. Making history here was less a linear process of events strung along a sequence than a cyclical one in which building and rebuilding of public structures (townhouses and council houses) and earthen mounds indexed local histories.
Several other studies trace historical developments behind the creation of new communities, traditions, and social worlds. In one of the most richly developed studies in the volume, Thomas J. Pluckhahn, Neill J. Wallis, and Victor D. Thompson narrate the history of “Weeden Islandization” of coastal areas in Florida along the edge of the Gulf of Mexico through a sequence of migration, dispersal, and coalescence. Using Bayesian modeled chronologies, the authors move from specific site biographies to a “big history” of the Gulf Coast that resulted in a new social order. Robert A. Cook examines a similar process of Mississippianization in the Ohio Valley through migrations, frontier sites, and the hybridized cultural practices of Fort Ancient villages. Shifting to the edges of the colonial Southeast, Jon Bernard Marcoux combines documentary, cartographic, and ceramic evidence to outline the formation of diasporic community—the Savannahs. Noting that social identities and archaeological signatures are not always isomorphous, John E. Worth suggests the historic turn should center on “landscapes of practice” rather than on identity.
Susan M. Alt's chapter on the Emerald Acropolis, a Cahokian shrine center in Illinois, begins with a simple but profound question: What really mattered to the Native people who established the site? This question arises not only from Alt's engagement with assemblage theory and Indigenous ontology but also from the strangeness of the site itself. Alt notes that Emerald only makes sense when one recognizes the power of other-than-human persons that loomed large in Native cosmologies. Pilgrims visited Emerald, a site organized along a lunar axis, for ceremonies that incorporated other-than-human agents through sacrifices and ceremonies involving water and fire.
Taken together, the case studies offer a dynamic picture of history making in the Native Southeast. Most studies in this volume are based on tight chronologies, large-scale excavations, river-drainage scale studies, and rich bodies of material evidence, signaling the serious evidentiary and methodological requirements of the historic turn. Moving forward, it will be exciting to see more studies that seek to understand Native communities’ own sense of history and how it connects to the present. Potential pathways for doing so include consulting with contemporary Indigenous scholars and constructing narratives that transgress the precolonial/colonial divide. With a turn toward history, new possibilities abound for seeing the Southeastern Native past as eventful as our own time.
