Center Places and Cherokee Towns: Archaeological Perspectives on Native American Architecture and Landscape in the Southern Appalachians

Abstract

Center Places and Cherokee Towns serves as an excellent example of using multiple lines of evidence to examine phenomena of diachronic change in archaeological research. Using archaeological and primary documentary data as well as nineteenth-century Cherokee oral history, Christopher B. Rodning examines the correlations between social relationships and spatial configurations of Native towns during the precontact and contact eras. At Coweeta Creek and other Cherokee sites across southern Appalachia, “center places” were created through the construction of earthen mounds, formalized architecture, and carefully placed and maintained hearths. Together, the components of central places anchored people to a social landscape and identity.Rodning argues that social and historical dimensions of places can be discerned through anthropological examination of how the built environment reflects cultural conceptions of landscape and community in Cherokee settlements, ethnohistory, and myth. The conclusions presented in this book derive from extant archaeological data of twentieth-century excavations at Coweeta Creek, a site that offers unique value to the diachronic study of Cherokee spatial and social organization because it spans the precontact and contact periods, has been extensively excavated, and represents the characteristics of other Cherokee sites in the region. Most chapters begin with a historical vignette from figures such as Alexander Longe and James Mooney, who recorded details about the Cherokee during the colonial period, and each chapter describes a different analytic scale of Cherokee center places. After a succinct introduction to Coweeta Creek in chapter 1, Rodning organizes his work from the top down with a regional perspective on Cherokee settlements in chapter 2. He describes the manifestations of center places in public architecture, such as town houses, and domestic architecture in chapters 3 and 4; outlines the important symbolism of hearths as center places (particularly the hearths of town houses, which are considered center places of towns) in chapter 5; and discusses burials under structures at Coweeta in chapter 6 as tools of social memory and ties to structure, place, and community. Chapter 7 considers the evidence of abandonment and resettlement at Coweeta Creek during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and chapter 8 concludes by contextualizing the site within the larger Cherokee landscape of southern Appalachia. Each chapter makes a significant contribution to the conceptual framework of center places but could also effectively stand alone.Though excavations at Coweeta Creek have been ongoing for decades and several publications about the site precede this one, Center Places offers several novel contributions to the study of Cherokee towns, including new evidence for a seventh construction stage of the Coweeta Creek town house, for which only six stages have been supposed. More important, Rodning’s work is a testament to the epistemological development within anthropological archaeology, which values ethnohistorical documents and oral traditions not just as supplementary resources with limited objective value but also as principal lines of evidence. Rodning injects his analysis of center places in Cherokee towns with samples of similar patterns seen in the archaeology, ethnohistory, and oral history of other regions, namely, the Southwest and Iroquoia, situating Coweeta Creek and other Cherokee settlements in a broader discourse concerning the relationships between people and place, the built environment of past settlements, and the manifestations of center places and center symbolism in archaeological, historical, and mythological data.Archaeological and historical analyses of pluralistic environments and culture contact necessitate a comparison of scale between the situated actions of individuals and the broader patterns of history. Center Places and Cherokee Towns provides that comparison in a style that is accessible and free of jargon, making it an ideal reference for undergraduate students. Instructors of undergraduate and graduate courses and researchers whose interests concern culture contact, archaeological analytic scale, Native studies, or ethnohistorical methods are sure to find Rodning’s book a valuable contribution to their repertoire.