Focusing on the American Cherokee people and the South Carolina settlers, this book traces the two cultures and their interactions from 1680, when Charleston was established as the main town in the region, until 1785, when the Cherokees first signed a treaty with the United States. Hatley retrieves the unfamiliar dimensions of a world in which Native Americans were at the center of Southern geopolitics and in which radically different social assumptions about the obligations of power, the place of women, and the use of the land fed the formative cultural psychology of the colonial South....

Considered a classic study of southeastern Indians, Powhatan s Mantle demonstrates how ethnohistory, demography, archaeology, anthropology, and cartography can be brought together in fresh and meaningful ways to illuminate life in the early South. In a series of provocative original essays, a dozen leading scholars show how diverse Native Americans interacted with newcomers from Europe and Africa during the three hundred years of dramatic change beginning in the early sixteenth century.

For this new and expanded edition, the original contributors have revisited their subjects to...