Alabama and the Borderlands From Prehistory to Statehood Open Access

This collection of 11 essays is devoted to an area neglected by historians of both Latin and North America. Michael C. Scardaville and Wilcomb E. Washburn agree that the literature on the Southeastern United States is scant, conceptually flawed, and weakest in coverage of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Unfortunately this volume does little to redress the imbalances described. Three essays summarize archaeological and anthropological research on the “Mississippian” Indian cultures which produced the distinctive temple mounds. Best is Bruce D. Smith’s piece on subsistence and settlement patterns. Four essays on European exploration focus on de Soto’s entrada, which Charles H. Fairbanks feels led to Indian depopulation and organizational collapse. Jeffrey Brain describes the archaeology of the expedition, and there is yet another attempt to trace de Soto’s route. In sum, this is primarily a history of conquest and colonization, and the social history of the Southeastern borderlands for the later colonial period still remains to be done.