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Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians. Edited by Thomas J. Pluckhahn and Robbie Ethridge. (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2006. Pp. 283. Cloth, $60.00; Paper, $34.95.)
Reviewed by Laurence M. Hauptman
Charles Hudson of the University of Georgia has revolutionized our understanding of the American Indians of the Southeast. After the publication of his Southeastern Indians (1976), a groundbreaking ethnography, the eminent anthropologist transformed himself into the leading ethnohistorian of the region. Largely influenced by the Annales historians, he ambitiously delved into the study of the documents of early European explorers of the Southeast. In numerous writings that culminated in Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando de Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms (1999), he significantly revised the findings of John Swanton and other earlier scholars.
Thomas J. Pluckhahn, an archaeologist at the University of Oklahoma and author of Kolomoki: Settlement, Ceremony and Status in the Deep South A.D. 350-750 (2003) and Robbie Ethridge, McMullan Professor of Southern Studies and an anthropologist at the University of Mississippi who previously authored Creek Country: The Creek Indians and Their World (2003), have coedited ten essays delivered at a conference at the University of Georgia in honor of Hudson. Seven of the essays are by anthropologists, mostly archaeologists. Although there is much valuable information presented, the coeditors have not provided connecting links to the essays. The articles jump in chronology and subject matter. Introductions to each of the essays would have made for a cohesive volume.
In a fascinating analysis, "The Cussita Migration Legend," Steven Hahn, a historian at St. Olaf College and the author of The Invention of the Creek Nation, 1670-1763 (2004), explains the origins of the legend, first recorded at Savannah...