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Mapping the Mississippian Shatter Zone: The Colonial Indian Slave Trade and Regional Instability in the American South. Edited by Robbie Ethridge and Sheri M. Shuck-Hall. (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, c. 2009. Pp. [x], 526. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8032-1759-1.)
For the last several decades scholars have recognized that dramatic changes reshaped the interior of the Southeast in the two centuries before 1730. The peoples between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River experienced and initiated colonial transformations as broad as they were deep. The hierarchical, so-called Mississippian chiefdoms that built massive earthen temple mounds abandoned those mounds and the hierarchies that they symbolized. The descendants of these relatively autonomous chiefdoms formed new confederacies, best exemplified by the Chickasaws, Cherokees, Choctaws, and Creeks. Centers of power shifted from the inland chiefdoms that controlled access to prestige goods like copper and shells to the colonial ports that sold cloth and firearms. Despite the significance of this period, it has been difficult to determine what actually happened during these poorly documented "forgotten centuries" (see Charles Hudson and Carmen Chaves Tesser, eds., The Forgotten Centuries: Indians and Europeans in the American South, 15211704 [Athens, Ga., 1994]).
Many answers lie within this excellent collection of fifteen essays about the "Mississippian shatter zone," a social science concept that the editors employ here to understand a new world born of Mississippian political instability, Eurasian epidemics, and nascent capitalist relations, especially the deerskin and slave trades. The violence of the slave trade proved especially devastating. From roughly 1650 until about 1720, native communities initiated wars against their neighbors in a quest for captives. These captives were then sold as slaves to English...