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A Glocal Perspective on Native American Landscapes 

 

CHARLES R. COBB, 2019. The Archaeology of Southeastern Native American 
Landscapes of the Colonial Era. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 286 pp. ISBN 
978-0-8130-6619-6 

 

Key Words: Landscape, Southeast, Colonialism, Glocal, Native American. 

 

Landscape has been a significant field of research in anthropology since the 1990s. Scholars 

have explored the significance of place and space, the social uses of natural environments, 

the demographic motility and coalescence across regions, and the politics of landscape 

through conflict worldwide. In this book, Charles Cobb brings together these questions into 

a transdisciplinary synthesis on what is known about Native American Southeastern 

landscapes, from the Mississippian through the early federalist eras. 

The value of this book primarily resides in the creative outlook that Cobb takes on the study 

of Native American history at the structural, theoretical, and thematic levels. Instead of using 

the traditional (and usually expected in historical accounts) chronological structure, preceded 

by an introduction and wrapped up in a conclusion, Cobb delivers his research in seven 

topical chapters across which population movement is the leitmotif. This structural choice 

probably stems from his intention to avoid linear evolutionary continuums and replace old 

paradigms with a fresh perspective on the North American indigenous past. The natural flow 

through which information is provided (sometimes, data partially overlap or are reiterated in 

different chapters) adds to the attempt to make historical discourse more accessible, giving 

the narrative a nearly conversational tone. 



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The first chapter presents the theoretical framework that Cobb uses to discuss landscape in 

the American Southeast. He adopts the precepts of neohistorical anthropology to approach 

the indigenous experiences from a “glocal” perspective (the intersection of global and local 

agencies), and to understand the impact of the Atlantic World on Native Americans’ lives. 

Concretely, he looks at the Native American landscape through materialist and postcolonial 

lenses, focusing his review on political-economic stances of power and inequality and 

highlighting Native Americans as primary actors in the process of modeling colonial 

landscapes. 

Chapters Two and Three cover the history of the Southeast, from the Mississippian 

emergence until the 1830 Indian Removal Act, and develop the notion of “persistent places” 

as constitutive elements of the Native American identity and culture. Chapters Four and Five 

concentrate on forced and voluntary migration, displacement, and emplacement. In Chapter 

Six, Cobb describes the intertwined relationship between climatic patterns and the trajectory 

of Mississippian polities. He delves into political economy and historical ecology to 

understand the social responses from indigenous communities. In particular, he emphasizes 

the role of trade in the colonial political economy as a major contributor to the entanglement 

between Native Americans and Europeans, and between the Southeast and the Atlantic 

World. In fact, trade proliferation and its subsequent decline (extending from the seventeenth 

to the early nineteenth centuries), affected Native American communities in various ways. 

Politically, it established power relations based on commodity flows instead of agricultural 

surplus; socially, it triggered further mobility and displacement; and environmentally, it 

promoted deer overharvesting and deforestation. The Revolutionary War (1781-1783) 

ruptured statis and dwindled trade. This led to demographic dissemination into individual 

homesteads, reduction of communal spaces, and privatization, which altered traditional 

landscapes and lifestyles. Finally, the last chapter addresses indigenous persistence in the 

face of crisis. The history of Native American landscapes is defined by transformation in the 

event of major social, cultural, economic, and religious ruptures. Therefore, the European 

arrival did not trigger collapse, but a history of persistence and (sometimes forced, voluntary, 

or opportunistic) transformation composed by different actors.   



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To address these topics, Cobb draws from anthropology, archaeology, and ethnohistory. He 

combines high-level theory with a series of microhistories that illustrate the continuous 

changes in the Southeast during the colonial era. In addition to enlightening his narrative with 

microhistories of the Chickasaw, Catawba, Cherokee, and other groups, Cobb’s chronicle is 

valuable for the thought-provoking, open-ended questions that he lays on the table: What 

happened to Yamasees sent to Cuba after the Paris Treaty? Why did a certain ceramic lingua 

franca style emerge in some Southeastern regions? Similarly, Cobb applies a linguistic 

approach to emphasize the importance of critical word-choice in social sciences. This way, 

he offers multiple constructive definitions of key concepts and conducts comparative analysis 

between them. Some of the most practical definitions he develops include the notion of 

landscape, the Atlantic World, emplacement and displacement, diaspora, colonialism, and 

colonization.  

Yet, somewhat surprisingly, the author does not mention the important role that other 

disciplines play in his study of the landscape. Human geography is indisputably a disciplinary 

pillar in the investigation of the flow of peoples and goods across the landscape. Additionally, 

there are some aspects in the book that would need further consideration and clarification. 

Regarding the research sample, Cobb’s framework is described to encompass “the lives of 

Native Americans during the colonial era as conveyed through the landscape […] from the 

Mississippi to the Atlantic Ocean” (pg. 2). However, he does not give equal attention to all 

southern regions. The focus is placed upon the British area of influence, while the landscapes 

of La Florida and the French Louisiana are significantly underrepresented. Methodologically, 

this book fails to include Native American voices. Even though his primary goal is to remove 

Europeans from the limelight to study the way Native Americans experienced landscape, 

Cobb does not engage in collaborative work with descendant communities to inform his 

research. Another aspect that could have greatly enriched this monograph is the study of 

landscape agency over, and its effect on, Native American lives from vital materialism and 

political ecology approaches. Landscapes have been proven to be more than mere containers 

of social development —they are impactful actors in the unfolding of human cultures. The 

same approach could have been taken on the agency of, for example, deerskin, and the thing-

power of nonhuman actants.  



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Furthermore, some specific conclusions also seem to be problematic. For instance, Cobb 

states that the loss of indigenous land due to the debt acquired with the British colony, and 

later with the United States, did not affect the Native American identity. According to the 

author, this is because indigenous identity has always been malleable and Native Americans 

were used to being uprooted for reasons of demography, conflict, religion, and ecology. Even 

though indigenous communities might have been more nomadic than other contemporaneous 

societies, Cobb’s argument might be perceived subjective, ill-founded, or culturally 

insensitive, particularly because of the already mentioned lack of Native American voices in 

his historical recount. 

Cobb also argues that the encounter (and subsequent processes of accommodation, 

resistance, flight, migration, and expansion) between colonizers and colonized peoples 

created a dialectical relationship that was translated into the landscape. In my opinion, the 

contact between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans built a dialogic environment of 

countering, collaboration, and compromise. Biological and cultural hybridization occurred, 

and the convergence between cultures transpires in the archaeological record. For example, 

Fort Moore (in Beech Island, South Carolina) was a military garrison built in the eighteenth 

century at the core of a major Indian trade path for commerce and to protect the colonial 

frontiers. The excavation of the site has revealed that the strict segregational policies put in 

place were often ignored - a Native American burial found within the fort shows that the 

existence of social and physical porosity at the fort defenses. Similarly, the archaeological 

recovery of cutting implements made of glass bottles and stemware at the Brafferton Indian 

School (in Williamsburg, Virginia) proves children adapted their tradition to their new 

emplacement. These examples suggest the existence of a dialogue between cultures and 

traditions, rather than a dialectic opposition.  

In conclusion, Cobb’s monography is a highly recommendable recount of the transformations 

occurred in the Southeastern colonial landscapes within the larger evolution of the Atlantic 

World, and would be valuable to both practicing archaeologists and graduate students 

interested in these themes.  

 



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

Louisiana State University and the assistant curator at LSU Natural Science Museum, 

where she curates ethnological and archaeological collections since 2020. Her research 

interests range from cultural heritage studies, museology, anthropological linguistics, and 

archaeology.  

 

 

© 2022 Irene Martí Gil 

 

 

 

 


