Overview

Methods, Mounds, and Missions offers innovative ways of looking at existing data, as well as compelling new information, about Florida’s past. Diverse in scale, topic, time, and region, the volume’s contributions span the late Archaic through historic periods and cover much of the state’s panhandle and peninsula, with forays into the larger Southeast and circum-Caribbean area. Subjects explored in this volume include coastal ring middens, chiefly power and social interaction in mound-building societies, pottery design and production, faunal evidence of mollusk harvesting, missions and missionaries, European iron celts or chisels, Hernando de Soto’s sixteenth-century expedition, and an early nineteenth-century Seminole settlement. The essays incorporate previously underexplored markers of culture histories such as clay sources and non-chert lithic tools and address complex issues such as the entanglement of utilitarian artifacts with sociocultural and ritual realms. Experts in their topical specializations, this volume’s contributors build on the research methods and interpretive approaches of influential anthropologist Jerald Milanich. They update current archaeological interpretations of Florida history, developing and demonstrating the use of new and improved tools to answer broader and larger questions.

Full Product Details

9781683402138

Table of Contents

Reviews

A dazzling array of research and ideas inspired by Jerald T. Milanich, doyen of Florida archaeology. Contributions by leading scholars on Weeden Island and later cultures, European contact archaeology, the Glades area, and Seminole archaeology means this important book will find a home on every Florida archaeologist's bookshelf. - Ryan Wheeler, coeditor of Iconography and Wetsite Archaeology of Florida's Watery Realms; A testament that Jerald Milanich has earned a place in the pantheon of Florida archaeologists, this volume searches for and fine-tunes the big picture he has long espoused. - Russell K. Skowronek, coeditor of Pieces of Eight: More Archaeology of Piracy.

Author Information

Ann S. Cordell retired in 2017 after 30 years as manager of the Ceramic Technology Laboratory at the Florida Museum of Natural History, where she is currently courtesy research scientist. She is coauthor of Archaeology of Northern Florida, A.D. 200-900: The McKeithen Weeden Island Culture. Jeffrey M. Mitchem is a research station archaeologist with the Arkansas Archeological Survey and research associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arkansas. He is coeditor of Native and Spanish New Worlds: Sixteenth-Century Entradas in the American Southwest and Southeast.

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