Charles Cobb, 2019, Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 286 pp. ISBN 978-0-8130-6619-6
Key Words: Landscape, Southeast, Colonialism, Glocal, Native American.
Landscape has been a significant field of research in anthropology since the 1990s. Scholars have explored the significance of place and space, the social uses of natural environments, the demographic motility and coalescence across regions, and the politics of landscape through conflict worldwide. In this book, Charles Cobb brings together these questions into a transdisciplinary synthesis on what is known about Native American Southeastern landscapes, from the Mississippian through the early federalist eras.
The value of this book primarily resides in the creative outlook that Cobb takes on the study of Native American history at the structural, theoretical, and thematic levels. Instead of using the traditional (and usually expected in historical accounts) chronological structure, preceded by an introduction and wrapped up in a conclusion, Cobb delivers his research in seven topical chapters across which population movement is the leitmotif. This structural choice probably stems from his intention to avoid linear evolutionary continuums and replace old paradigms with a fresh perspective on the North American indigenous past. The natural flow through which information is provided (sometimes, data partially overlap or are reiterated in different chapters) adds to the attempt to make historical discourse more accessible, giving the narrative a nearly conversational tone.
The first chapter presents the theoretical framework that Cobb uses to discuss landscape in the American Southeast. He adopts the precepts of neohistorical anthropology to approach the indigenous experiences from a “glocal” perspective (the intersection of global and local agencies), and to understand the impact of the Atlantic World on Native Americans’ lives. Concretely, he looks at the Native American landscape through materialist and postcolonial lenses, focusing his review on political-economic stances of power and inequality and highlighting Native Americans as primary actors in the process of modeling colonial landscapes.
Chapters Two and Three cover the history of the Southeast, from the Mississippian emergence until the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and develop the notion of “persistent places” as constitutive elements of the Native American identity and culture. Chapters Four and Five concentrate on forced and voluntary migration, displacement, and emplacement. In Chapter Six, Cobb describes the intertwined relationship between climatic patterns and the trajectory of Mississippian polities. He delves into political economy and historical ecology to understand the social responses from indigenous communities. In particular, he emphasizes the role of trade in the colonial political economy as a major contributor to the entanglement between Native Americans and Europeans, and between the Southeast and the Atlantic World. In fact, trade proliferation and its subsequent decline (extending from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries), affected Native American communities in various ways. Politically, it established power relations based on commodity flows instead of agricultural surplus; socially, it triggered further mobility and displacement; and environmentally, it promoted deer overharvesting and deforestation. The Revolutionary War (1781-1783) ruptured statis and dwindled trade. This led to demographic dissemination into individual homesteads, reduction of communal spaces, and privatization, which altered traditional landscapes and lifestyles. Finally, the last chapter addresses indigenous persistence in the face of crisis. The history of Native American landscapes is defined by transformation in the event of major social, cultural, economic, and religious ruptures. Therefore, the European arrival did not trigger collapse, but a history of persistence and (sometimes forced, voluntary, or opportunistic) transformation composed by different actors.
To address these topics, Cobb draws from anthropology, archaeology, and ethnohistory. He combines high-level theory with a series of microhistories that illustrate the continuous changes in the Southeast during the colonial era. In addition to enlightening his narrative with microhistories of the Chickasaw, Catawba, Cherokee, and other groups, Cobb’s chronicle is valuable for the thought-provoking, open-ended questions that he lays on the table: What happened to Yamasees sent to Cuba after the Paris Treaty? Why did a certain ceramic lingua franca style emerge in some Southeastern regions? Similarly, Cobb applies a linguistic approach to emphasize the importance of cri