Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900

Scheiber, Laura L. & Mitchell, Mark D. (eda0

ISBN 10: 0816532087 / ISBN 13: 9780816532087

Published by University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ, 2015

About this Item

342pp.incl.index; SC white w/blk.spine-color photocover; some rub w/some ink underline,otherwise clean, tight pgs. "This book addresses colonial interactions in North America from the fifteenth century through the nineteenth century." some illus.

Seller Inventory # 054164

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Across a Great Divide: Continuity and Change in Native North American Societies, 1400-1900
• Publisher: University of Arizona Press, Tucson, AZ
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816532087
• ISBN 13: 9780816532087
• Binding: Paper Back
• Edition: First Paper Edition
• Condition: Very Good+
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • Stan

About this title

Synopsis

Archaeological research is uniquely positioned to show how native history and native culture affected the course of colonial interaction, but to do so it must transcend colonialist ideas about Native American technological and social change. This book applies that insight to five hundred years of native history. Using data from a wide variety of geographical, temporal, and cultural settings, the contributors examine economic, social, and political stability and transformation in indigenous societies before and after the advent of Europeans and document the diversity of native colonial experiences. The book’s case studies range widely, from sixteenth-century Florida, to the Great Plains, to nineteenth-century coastal Alaska.

The contributors address a series of interlocking themes. Several consider the role of indigenous agency in the processes of colonial interaction, paying particular attention to gender and status. Others examine the ways long-standing native political economies affected, and were in turn affected by, colonial interaction. A third group explores colonial-period ethnogenesis, emphasizing the emergence of new native social identities and relations after 1500. The book also highlights tensions between the detailed study of local cases and the search for global processes, a recurrent theme in postcolonial research.

If archaeologists are to bridge the artificial divide separating history from prehistory, they must overturn a whole range of colonial ideas about American Indians and their history. This book shows that empirical archaeological research can help replace long-standing models of indigenous culture change rooted in colonialist narratives with more nuanced, multilinear models of change—and play a major role in decolonizing knowledge about native peoples.

About the Author

Laura L. Scheiber is an assistant professor of anthropology at Indiana University and co-editor of Archaeological Landscapes on the High Plains. Mark D. Mitchell is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of Colorado.