Across the social sciences, gradualist evolutionary models of historical dynamics are giving way to explanations focused on the punctuated and contingent "events" through which history is actually experienced. The Archaeology of Events is the first book-length work that systematically applies this new eventful approach to major developments in the pre-Columbian Southeast.

Traditional accounts of pre-Columbian societies often portray them as "cold" and unchanging for centuries or millennia. Events-based analyses have opened up archaeological discourse to the more nuanced and...