A01=Heather A. Lapham
American Indians
archaeology
artifacts
Author_Heather A. Lapham
Category=JHMC
Category=NHTB
Category=NKD
ceramics
ceremonial complex
climate
Early Archaic
Eastern United States
environment
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
excavations
farming
fauna
fishing
geology
habitats
hunting
Indigenous societies
material culture
Middle Archaic
Middle Woodland
migration
mounds
Native Americans
Paleoindians
plants
Pleistocene
pottery
projectile points
public archaeology
settlement
shell middens
shellfish
southeastern archaeology
subsistence
violence
warfare
water transportation
Woodland period
Product details
- ISBN 9780817352769
- Weight: 315g
- Dimensions: 158 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 12 Feb 2006
- Publisher: The University of Alabama Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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This volume investigates the use of deer, deerskins, and nonlocal goods in the period from A.D. 1400 to 1700 to gain a comprehensive understanding of historic-era cultural changes taking place within Native American communities in the southern Appalachian Highlands. In the 1600s, hunting deer to obtain hides for commercial trade evolved into a substantial economic enterprise for many Native Americans in the Middle Atlantic and Southeast. An overseas market demand for animal hides and furs imported from the Americas, combined with the desire of infant New World colonies to find profitable export commodities, provided a new market for processed deerskins as well as new sources of valued nonlocal goods. This new trade in deerskins created a reorganization of the priorities of native hunters that initiated changes in native trade networks, political alliances, gender relations, and cultural belief systems. Through research on faunal remains and mortuary assemblages, Lapham tracks both the products Native Americans produced for colonial trade - deerskins and other furs - as well as those items received in exchange - European and native prestige goods that end up in burial contexts. Zooarchaeological analyses provide insights into subsistence practices, deer-hunting strategies, and deer-hide production activities, while an examination of mortuary practices contributes information on the use of the nonlocal goods acquired through trade in deerskins. This study reveals changes in economic organization and mortuary practices that provide new insights into how participation in the colonial deerskin trade initially altered Native American social relations and political systems.
Heather A. Lapham is Curator of the Center for Archaeological Investigations at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and a specialist in zooarchaeology.
