Starting with the basic archaeological evidence and the written records of early Spanish and English visitors, Patricia Galloway traces the likely origin of the Choctaw people, their movements and interactions with other native groups in the South, and their response to Euro-American contacts. She thereby creates the first careful and complete history of the tribe in the early modern period. This rich and detailed work-winner of the Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Prize, the James Mooney Award, and the McLemore Prize-not only provides much new information on the Choctaws but illuminates the entire...

Practicing Ethnohistory is a compendium of twenty-one essays on ethnohistorical historiography. The essays, preceded by a contextualizing introduction, are organized under four topical heads: textual historiography, positive analytic methods using nontextual physical evidence, ethnohistorical synthesis, and the ethical-contextual issues of ethnohistory. Part 1 focuses on issues such as concerns over the editing of ethnohistorical materials, the limitations of direct historical analogy in archaeology, and the use of archaeological evidence to deconstruct colonialist history when real events...

From 1539 to 1542 Hernando de Soto and several hundred armed men cut a path of destruction and disease across the Southeast from Florida to the Mississippi River. The eighteen contributors to this volume anthropologists, ethnohistorians, and literary critics investigate broad cultural and literary aspects of the resulting social and demographic collapse or radical transformation of many Native societies and the gradual opening of the Southeast to European colonization."

To most people it probably seems that La Salle and his men, permanently fixed in the pantheon of explorers of the North American continent, need little further introduction. The fact is that this whole early period of exploration and colonization by the French in the southeastern United States has received far less scholarly attention than the corresponding English and Spanish activities in the same area, and even the existing scholarship has failed to focus clearly upon the Indian tribes whose attitudes toward the European new comers were crucial to their very survival.

In this collection...

Three centuries after the French explorer La Salle was murdered in the Texas wilds, this volume presents translations of three obscure documents that broaden the view of the man and his exploits. The first non-Spanish effort to settle areas along the Gulf of Mexico is seen from the perspectives of La Salle's engineer; a Spanish pilot who searched for the French colony; and two French lads who, orphaned as a result of the Fort Saint-Louis massacre, lived first among the Texas Indians, then the Spaniards.
The engineer Minet relates both La Salle's 1682 exploration of the Mississippi River...