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From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540-1715. By Robbie Ethridge. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. xiv, 344 pp. $37.50, isbn 978-08078-3435-0.)
Scholars once referred to the years spanning 1540 to 1715 as part of the forgotten centuries in the Native American history of the South. In recent years, however, archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians have shed more light on this period's history, and Robbie Ethridge has done a service in compiling and synthesizing all the new work into one much-needed volume. She has also contributed some original research of her own, and the book as a whole represents a refreshing conceptualization.
Ethridge's theme is one of transformation: she shows how southern Native Americans, from Mississippian times to the early eighteenth century, changed and restructured their societies under the...