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ROBBIE ETHRIDGE AND ERIC E. BOWNE, 2020, The Historical Turn in Southeastern 

Archaeology, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 258 pp., ISBN 9781683401629.  

Keywords: historical archaeology, prehistory, post-colonial studies, Native American 

history, Southeastern U.S. 

Ethridge and Bowne’s edited volume explores the historicization of Southeastern 

archaeology to decolonize old-fashioned Western accounts of the North American deep past 

and write a more inclusive, accurate, and historical alternative. Inspired by Eric Wolf’s 

(1982) transgressive “Europe and the people without history,” this book places Indigenous 

experiences, ontologies, and consciousness in the limelight of scholarly research. Through a 

selection of essays that bridge the conceptual, theoretical, and methodological gap between 

North American prehistory and history, Ethridge and Bowne shape the historical turn as a 

heterogenous, multifaceted, and complex venture that takes on multiple perspectives to 

address a common goal: to tell the full story of North America. In fact, this compilation of 

essays is built in a rhizomatic fashion that honors the nature of the historical turn. The lack 

of thematical unity, the theoretical diversity in the essays, and the divergent inferences drawn 

from the data analyses exude refreshing disarray. It is uncommon to stumble upon an 

archaeological publication that openly portrays the inherent contradictions within the 

discipline. However, this volume not only makes them evident but pays tribute to the 

dynamic and fluctuant qualities of scientific knowledge. The only aspect that remains 

normative is the structure of the book itself.  

“The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology” is elegantly distributed in seven chapters, 

which loosely follow a chronological order from the Archaic to colonial times, that are 

framed by a preface and an afterword. R. Ethridge, R. Beck, and E. Bowne in the 

introduction, and K. Sassaman and T. Pauketat in the conclusion, explain the origin of the 



 
 

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history-prehistory divide and describe the evolution of the discipline until the historical turn 

occurred in the twenty-first century. This framework beautifully puts together an otherwise 

unruly mix of theoretical perspectives and methods, ranging from progressive to conservative 

approaches, that corroborates the healthy diversity existing in archaeological practice.   

At the progressive end, post-structuralist entanglement theory and new materialism are 

pivotal in the historicization of prehistory. A. Randall (Chapter 1) studies the relational webs 

of meaning established between Archaic peoples along the St. Johns River in Northeastern 

Florida with their surrounding and cosmic geographies, their real and mythic temporalities, 

and their human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic agents of placemaking and social 

memory. The sum of these actors worked together in re-creating the world of ancient 

Floridians and constituted equally significant elements in their history-making. The link 

between landscape, sacred geographies, and local histories is also the core topic in Chapter 

3, by S. Alt. The author advocates for the adoption of new ontological perspectives that 

include other-than-human persons and unseen powers to understand the Greater Cahokia 

urban phenomenon. By combining ethnohistorical accounts of Cahokian descendant groups 

and scientific data generated from excavating the Emerald Acropolis, Alt concludes that the 

assemblage of vibrant natural, anthropogenic, and mystic agents made the landscape of 

Cahokia an ideal cosmogram to access the underworld and interact with otherworldly powers, 

thus a desirable place to settle. Also centered on place-making is C. Rodning and L. 

Sullivan’s Chapter 5, which focuses on the power that the built environment played in the 

history-making of the Southern Appalachian communities, from the fifteenth to the 

eighteenth centuries. The functional and symbolic properties of domestic and public 

architecture turned Native American towns into places of dwelling, collective memory, 

individual and communal healing, sociopolitical geography and development, and 

cosmological connections. 

R. Cook (Chapter 4), aiming to reconcile scientific and humanistic views in a “processual 

plus” endeavor (p.85), shows the benefits of synthesizing processual and historical 

approaches in archaeological research. The author examines the shift to Mississippian life 

along the Middle Ohio River to understand why and how the Fort Ancient lifeways spread 

along the Great and Little Miami Rivers. 



 
 

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From a more processual vantage point, T. Pluckhahn, N. Wallis, and V. Thompson (Chapter 

2) address the Woodland period in the Florida panhandle and the adjacent interior regions of 

Alabama and Georgia. By conducting Bayesian modeling of radiocarbon and 

thermoluminescence dates, the authors compare the local biographies of individual 

communities to explain larger, multi-site processes. In particular, they investigate the deep 

social restructuring that occurred over the sixth and seventh centuries in nine different sites, 

which involved dramatic migration movements, transference of material traditions, and 

changes in ideologies and practices across the region. As a result, they reconstruct the “big 

history” behind the Weeden Islandization process along the Gulf Coast. From a similar 

processual perspective, J. Marcoux (Chapter 6) applies quantitative analysis techniques to 

pottery data to reveal how the early colonial turmoil triggered diasporic indigenous 

communities. By looking at the potter’s intentional choices, such as the tempering agents, 

wall thickness, or surface treatment in the Shawnee ceramic production in Georgia and South 

Carolina, the author concludes that various potting traditions coexisted within sites, which 

indicates extensive social reshuffling and coalescence as a result of European colonization.  

Finally, at the far end of the processual spectrum, J. Worth (Chapter 7) reflects on the core 

values of the historicization of prehistory and advocates for a positivist historical turn, in 

which interpretations must be only based on verifiable empirical data. Hence, the author 

argues that only by doing research on communities of practice, which can be traced 

archaeologically and historically through material and textual evidence, can anthropologists 

gain some reliable understanding of the communities of identity. Despite Worth’s valuable 

perspective on the amalgamation of archaeological and historical disciplines for the 

reconstruction of the Native American past, his savage critique of post-processualism comes 

across as archconservative and untimely, considering the post-processualism-oriented pieces 

of research presented in the same volume.  

In conclusion, “The Historical Turn in Southeastern Archaeology” intends not to lay the 

foundations of a new archaeological paradigm but to offer a taste of the endless possibilities 

that historicization can bring to academic research. This is because the historical turn is not 

a monolithic approximation to the past but an analytical principle open to interpretation. The 

natural indefiniteness and malleability of this concept make it highly powerful and widely 



 
 

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applicable, as it fits into any underlying theoretical parameters, from vanguardist to 

conservative approaches, as this volume successfully proves. Conceiving the ancient past as 

history instead of prehistory constitutes a fundamental step forward in the attempt to grasp 

the pre-colonial lives, practices, and agencies of humans and nonhumans in their complex, 

dynamic, and contingent cultural and natural landscapes. Furthermore, the repercussions of 

introducing the historical turn in southeastern archaeology exceed the merely scholarly 

purpose: it gives voice to descendant communities, decolonizes views of the Native 

American past, and brings American Indigenous into the flow of American history.  

Irene Martí Gil is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Geography and Anthropology at 

Louisiana State University and a former assistant curator at LSU Natural Science Museum. 

Her research interests range from cultural heritage studies, museology, anthropological 

linguistics, and archaeology. 

 

 

© 2022 Irene Martí Gil 

 


