“The last piece” of Helen C. Rountree’s “life’s work as a cultural anthropologist”—a decades-long quest to publish book-length treatments of all southern Algonquian peoples—has finally appeared (xi). Rountree has served as the preeminent authority on early historic southern Algonquians since the 1989 publication of her The Powhatan Indians of Virginia, a groundbreaking work of ethnohistorical scholarship that is littered across the notes of all serious work concerning Virginia immediately before and during the era of first English settlement. With Manteo’s World, Rountree’s fourth monograph, her esteemed oeuvre has acquired a worthy capstone. Rountree here turns her incisive ethnological gaze south of Virginia for the first time, toward the Algonquians of the Carolina coast. In eight chapters, she synthesizes the entirety of historical sources on the Carolinian Algonquians and expertly supplements this sparse data set with closely related sources from Virginia as well as scientific insights from ecology and...
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