Powhatan's Mantle

Indians in the Colonial Southeast

by Gregory A Waselkov

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 offer further insights based on years of additional scholarship. The book includes four new essays, on calumet ceremonialism, social diversity in French Louisiana, the gendered nature of Cherokee agriculture, and the ideology of race among Creek Indians. The result is a volume filled with detailed information and challenging, up-to-date reappraisals reflecting the latest interdisciplinary research, ranging from Indian mounds and map symbolism to diplomatic practices and social structure, written to interest fellow scholars and informed general readers.

Gregory A. Waselkov is a professor of anthropology and director of the Center for Archaeological Studies at the University of South Alabama. He is the coeditor of William Bartram on the Southeastern Indians. Peter H. Wood is a professor of history at Duke University. He is the author of Strange New Land: Africans in Colonial America and a coauthor of the U.S. history textbook Created Equal. Tom Hatley is Sequoyah Distinguished Professor in Cherokee Studies at Western Carolina University and the author of The Dividing Paths: Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution.

Contributors include: Ian W. Brown, Amy Turner Bushnell, Kathleen DuVal, Patricia Galloway, Tom Hatley, Vernon James Knight Jr., Martha W. McCartney, James H. Merrell, Stephen R. Potter, Claudio Saunt, Marvin T. Smith, Helen Hornbeck Tanner, Daniel H. Usner Jr., Gregory A. Waselkov, and Peter H. Wood.

554 pp ~ illustrated — ©2006