Abstract
Scholars and the public alike view the European arrival in the Western Hemisphere as heralding a decisive break between millennia of continual, but typically gradual, changes in native societies and tumultuous centuries of societal and population collapse. Much is true about a characterization of the postcontact period as a time when native populations underwent calamitous declines, well-established cultural patterns were disrupted, and people were displaced from long-occupied land. But in eastern North America, such statements, baldly stated, seriously mischaracterize the dynamic nature of precontact societies and how centuries-long histories of regional population growth and decline, societal change, and intergroup relations set the stage for what took place following contact. Archaeological data show that during the last several centuries of the precontact period there was considerable variation across eastern North America in how societies were structured and, the particular focus of this chapter, both the distribution of people and the intensity of conflict among them. The identification of a marked precontact reduction in the midcontinent’s inhabitants and a band of conflict-prone societies bordering the depopulated area shows that the situation immediately prior to ca. AD 1500 had a greater influence on what took place afterwards than has been previously recognized.
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Notes
- 1.
An overview of the development of twentieth-century scholarship that makes use of both archaeological and historical source material can be found in Rubertone (2000). This combination of disciplines is often an uneasy relationship where the strengths and weaknesses of different kinds of information, each with their own set of biases, are not fully appreciated.
- 2.
The first Europeans to establish a toehold in North America did so a millennium ago when the Norse intermittently contacted people they called skraeling along the coastlines of eastern Canada (Odess et al. 2000). Although the Norse settled for a short period in Newfoundland, they maintained only a tenuous grip on the westernmost edge of their world, finally pulling back from Greenland in the fifteenth century. Relatively few families that were focused on small landholdings were far different from early modern nations that for various economic, political, and religious reasons were intent on expanding their spheres of influence in North America, starting in the sixteenth century.
- 3.
Time can be split into any number of segments to suit the purpose and convenience of the writer. Fontana (1965), for example, divides relatively late Indian sites into protohistoric, contact, and postcontact, although he does not explicitly discuss Southeastern sites. Settlements encountered by the de Soto expedition uncomfortably straddle his protohistoric and contact categories because these places were mentioned, however briefly and imprecisely, in accounts of the ill-fated journey, but immediately thereafter they disappear again from written documents. There is little to be gained by splitting hairs over how one classifies units of time as long as they serve a practical purpose, such as protohistoric as conventionally used by Eastern Woodlands archaeologists.
- 4.
In the late 1980s when I first pointed out at a meeting of the Midwest Archaeological Conference that there was significant intergroup conflict in some parts of the prehistoric Eastern Woodlands, specifically western Illinois, the idea was met with widespread disbelief, if not outright scorn. The next time I did so, I took the precaution of clicking through numerous slides of arrowheads lodged in bones, crania with cuts from scalping, and the like. That prompted a dozen or more colleagues to seek me out afterwards and say something along the lines of the following: “If I had not seen it, I would not have believed it.”
- 5.
Such work takes considerable time and effort, which is why comparable data are not available for the entirety of the late prehistoric period. Other reasons include a widespread disinterest in population-related issues and a preference for studying the characteristics of local occupations at the expense of developing quantitative assessments of how people were distributed across large geographical regions.
- 6.
The once-common assumption of continuous population growth and resource-rich places full of people was driven home to me when, in the early 1980s, I first presented newly generated data on the timing and magnitude of population decline in the Mississippi River valley near the large Cahokia mound center. I was told in no uncertain terms that it was impossible for populations to have declined during the final centuries of prehistory. The recently refined Cahokia-area ceramic chronology used to arrange sites in time must be wrong because it indicated a population reversal at the end of prehistory. As I recall, that conversation occurred at meeting of the Midwest Archaeological Conference. It would not have taken place at the Southeastern Archaeological Conference because by the mid-1980s a number of mostly young archaeologists—notably David G. Anderson (1994; Anderson et al. 1986)—were actively involved in laying out the evidentiary basis for volatile sociopolitical and demographic Mississippian period landscapes in the Southeast. This interest stemmed, in part, from an influential and innovative meshing of archaeological and historical records pertaining to sixteenth-century Spanish expeditions that penetrated deep into the Southeast (Hudson et al. 1985).
- 7.
In that respect, these groups were much like other traditional societies elsewhere in the world. That includes the peoples of medieval Europe who were feeling the effects of a climatic downturn at about the same time (Rosen 2014).
- 8.
- 9.
Nothing here is surprising because much the same happened in parts of contemporaneous Europe to people who were living in far different kinds of societies, only there historical documentation is plentiful (Parker 2013).
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In addition to the volume editors who invited me to participate in an American Anthropological Association session where a short version of this chapter was presented, I would like to thank George Chaplin who produced the figures used in this chapter for other papers.
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Milner, G.R. (2019). Bridging the Precontact and Postcontact Divide in Eastern North America: Prior Conditions Set the Stage for Historic Period Outcomes. In: Buikstra, J.E. (eds) Bioarchaeologists Speak Out. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93012-1_4
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