Continuity and Change in the Native American Village
Multicultural Origins and Descendants of the Fort Ancient Culture

Cook demonstrates that we can better allow for affiliation of archaeological sites with living descendants by more fully examining the complexity of the past.

Robert A. Cook (Author)

9781107619111, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 20 May 2021

304 pages
25.5 x 18 x 2 cm, 0.58 kg

Two common questions asked in archaeological investigations are: where did a particular culture come from, and which living cultures is it related to? In this book, Robert A. Cook brings a theoretically and methodologically holistic perspective to his study on the origins and continuity of Native American villages in the North American Midcontinent. He shows that to affiliate archaeological remains with descendant communities fully we need to unaffiliate some of our well-established archaeological constructs. Cook demonstrates how and why Native American villages formed and responded to events such as migration, environment and agricultural developments. He focuses on the big picture of cultural relatedness over broad regions and the amount of social detail that can be gleaned from archaeological and biological data, as well as oral histories.

Acknowledgments
Prologue: unaffiliating the past to affiliate with the present
1. The Fort Ancient 'savage slot' and its descendants
2. Deconstructing Fort Ancient culture
3. Theories of culture process and history
4. The study region: 'a most delightful country'
5. Worlds colliding: Mississippian punctuations and woodland continuities
6. Hybrid villagers: becoming people of the Earth and sky
7. Coalescence and descendance: the persistence of the village form
8. Multicultural processes and histories
Epilogue: changing our cultural landscape.

Subject Areas: Anthropology [JHM], Indigenous peoples [JFSL9], Archaeology [HD], History of the Americas [HBJK]