In Chiefdoms, Collapse, and Coalescence in the Early American South Robin Beck documents the Indians of the Carolina Piedmont and their violent transition from Mississippian chiefdoms to their eventual coalescence into the Catawba of the 1700s. Beck argues that this transition was a fundamental change in political economy from chiefdoms that prioritized maize and surplus labor to coalescent communities that emphasized “guns, slaves, and hides” (i). Positing an event-based framework, Beck states that occurrences like the introduction of the Indian slave trade “soon disjointed the virtual schemas and actual resources that structured southeastern chiefdoms” (16). Beck’s framework brilliantly explains not simply how the shattering of Mississippian chiefdoms occurred but “also why it unfolded in the specific way that it did” (8).
Beck’s narrative is broken into three sections—chiefdoms, collapse, and coalescence—as he focuses on the changing political and economic structures of the Indians of the Carolina Piedmont and the events...
