Books in the Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series series

The residents of Mississippian towns principally located in the southeastern and midwestern United States from 900 to1500 A.D. made many beautiful objects, which included elaborate and well-crafted copper and shell ornaments, pottery vessels, and stonework. Some of these objects were socially valued goods and often were placed in ritual context, such as graves.The funerary context of these artifacts has sparked considerable study and debate among archaeologists, raising questions about the place in society of the individuals interred with such items, as well as the nature of the societies in which these people lived.By focusing on how mortuary practices serve as symbols of beliefs and values for the living, the contributors to Mississippian Mortuary Practices explore how burial of the dead reflects and reinforces the cosmology of specific cultures, the status of living participants in the burial ceremony, ongoing kin relationships, and other aspects of social organization.

Presents new data and interpretations from research at Florida's Spanish missions, outposts established in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to strengthen the colonizing empire and convert Indigenous groups to Christianity.

Contributors to this volume show how stylistic and iconographic analyses of Mississippian imagery provide new perspectives on the beliefs, narratives, public ceremonies, ritual regimes, and expressions of power in the communities that created the artwork.

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.

Bringing together major archaeological research projects from Virginia to Alabama, this volume explores the rich prehistory of the Southeastern Coastal Plain. Contributors consider how the region's warm weather, abundant water, and geography have long been optimal for the habitation of people beginning 50,000 years ago.

Presents a temporally and geographically broad yet detailed history of an important form of Native American architecture, the platform mound. While the variation in these earthen monuments across the Eastern United States has sparked much debate among archaeologists, this landmark study reveals unexpected continuities over thousands of years.

Uses case studies to capture the recent emphasis on history in archaeological reconstructions of America's deep past, representing a profound shift in thinking about precolonial and colonial history and helping to erase the false divide between ancient and contemporary America.

Investigates the influence of Cahokia, the largest city of North America's Mississippian culture between AD 1050 and 1350, on smaller communities throughout the midcontinent. Christina Friberg examines the cultural give-and-take Audrey inhabitants experienced between new Cahokian customs and old Woodland ways of life.

Examines the everyday lives of enslaved and free workers at Morne Patate, an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Caribbean plantation, helping document the under-represented history of slavery and colonialism on the edge of the British Empire.

Brings together leading archaeologists working across the American South to offer a comprehensive, comparative analysis of Spanish entrada assemblages, providing insights into the sixteenth-century indigenous communities of North America and the colonizing efforts of Spain.

Compiles all the major writings of Spanish explorers in the area between 1513 and 1566. Including transcriptions of the original Spanish documents as well as English translations, this volume presents - in their own words - the experiences and reactions of Spaniards who came to Florida with Juan Ponce de Leon, Panfilo de Narvaez, Hernando de Soto, and Pedro Menendez de Aviles.

For more than 130 years, research aimed at understanding Paleoindian occupation of the coastal Southeast has progressed at a glacial pace. In this volume, James Dunbar suggests that the most important archaeological and paleontological resources in the Americas still remain undiscovered in Florida's karst river basins.

An exploration of the role of human adaptation along the Gulf coast of Florida and the influence of coastal foraging on several indigenous Florida populations. This location includes remnants of a prehistoric Indian village and a massive ancient burial mound, known as the Palmer Site.

A much-needed synthesis of the rapidly expanding archaeological work that has taken place in the Moundville region over the past two decades, this volume presents the results of multifaceted research and new excavations.

Presents fourteen in-depth case studies that incorporate empirical data with theoretical concepts such as ritual, aggregation, and place-making, highlighting the variability and common themes in the relationships between people, landscapes, and the built environment that characterize this period of North American native life in the Southeast.

Although scholars have long recognized the mythic status of bears in indigenous North American societies of the past, this is the first volume to synthesize the vast amount of archaeological and historical research on the topic.

The years 1500-1700 AD were a time of dramatic change for the indigenous inhabitants of southeastern North America. Using archaeology to enhance our knowledge of the period, this book presents new research on the ways Native societies responded to early contact with Europeans.

While previous research on household archaeology in the colonial Caribbean has drawn heavily on artifact analysis, this volume provides the first in-depth examination of the architecture of slave housing during this period.

Uses archaeological and historical evidence to reconstruct daily life at Betty's Hope plantation on the island of Antigua, one of the largest sugar plantations in the Caribbean. The book demonstrates the rich information that multidisciplinary studies can provide about the effects of sugarcane agriculture on the region and its people.

Very little research has been published on the Archaic period shell mounds in the Middle Cumberland River Valley. Demonstrating that nearly forty such sites exist, this volume presents the results of recent surveys, excavations, and laboratory work as well as fresh examinations of past investigations that have been difficult for scholars to access.

Caribbean plantations and the forces that shaped them - slavery, sugar, capitalism, and the environment - have been widely studied. This volume brings together alternate stories of sites that fall outside the cash-crop estates, investigating the oft-overlooked interstitial spaces where enslaved Africans sought to maintain their own identities.

Focusing on the daily concerns and routine events of people in the past, Investigating the Ordinary argues for a paradigm shift in the way southeastern archaeologists operate. Instead of dividing archaeological work by time periods or artifact types, the essays in this volume unite separate areas of research through the theme of the everyday.