Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast ed. by Gregory A. Waselkov

Abstract

Reviewed by: Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast ed. by Gregory A. Waselkov Benjamin J. Hoksbergen Native American Log Cabins in the Southeast. Edited by Gregory A. Waselkov. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2019. 236 pp. $45.00. ISBN 978-1-6219-0504-2. In March of 2017, I had the privilege of joining Greg Waselkov, his longtime collaborator, Craig Sheldon, and several other colleagues for a day of excavation on site 1Lo210, the historic location of Ikanachaki, or "Holy Ground," the town established by the Creek prophet Josiah Francis in 1813 as a place of defensive aggregation of Redstick Creeks. The town is perhaps best known as the staging ground for the attack on Fort Mims in August of 1813. The site had only been discovered five years prior and was remarkably intact. To the trained eye, the footprints of Creek cabins could be discerned right on the forested surface of the site. Excavations revealed a midden of early nineteenth-century Creek artifacts and architectural features associated with the cabins. Many of these were features only an archaeologist could---little more than stains in the soil marking prepared clay hearths, bases of stick-and-mud chimneys, shallow trenches for wall sills, and pits dug as sources for clay chinking. Nonetheless, careful excavation and analysis of these well-preserved features that could have easily been eradicated by a single swipe of a plow blade or through indiscriminate digging by artifact collectors (as has been the case on so many similar sites), revealed unprecedented details of early nineteenth-century Creek architecture. These discoveries were the impetus for a 2016 symposium at the 73rd annual meeting of the Southeastern Archaeological Conference in Athens, Georgia, which became the basis for this edited volume. The book draws together contributors from across the region and covers numerous topics, including chapters on the architecture of [End Page 256] the Upper Creeks of central Alabama and Georgia, the Catawba of southwestern North Carolina, the Cherokee of northern Georgia and western North Carolina, and the Choctaw of east-central Mississippi. The common thread is the seemingly radical shift in residential architecture among these various Native American communities from traditional wattle-and-daub thatched-roof houses rooted in Pre-Columbian Mississippian culture to Euro-American style log cabins beginning in the late eighteenth century. In all the myriad aspects of material culture, the buildings in which we shelter and nourish our families are among the most personal reflections of our relationship to our broader community and our cultural norms and traditions. Yet a simple glance at house styles within our own culture---not to mention across cultures globally-attests to the infinite diversity possible within domestic architecture. Selection of a house style is strictly governed by a number of variables ranging from the material (the cost or availability of raw materials), to the social (the impression on our neighbors), to the psychological (comfort and familiarity). Thus, the overarching question explored in the book: Why did Native American groups across the Southeast adopt foreign modes of house construction during a period of rapid change and uncertainty when the predicted tendency would be to embrace the familiar and traditional? As with most anthropological questions, a reader looking for a simple answer will be disappointed. The contributors all draw on an impressive multidisciplinary corpus of evidence which demonstrates that the shift in house style was not as radical and universal as it first appears. Through careful analysis of archaeological data, along with historical sources including contemporary eyewitness accounts, census reports and property assessments, and even artwork, the authors develop careful timelines for the changes in domestic architecture. In so doing, they document intermediate and hybrid styles and the contemporaneity of various styles within individual communities. They also identify vestiges of traditional elements in many Native American log houses including central hearths without chimneys and cellars dug below the floors of some Cherokee cabins that appear to have served similar functions [End Page 257] as the o:si, or winter houses, which were foci for Cherokee traditional and ritual practices. In general, however, the studies document a very real trend away from traditional Native American house styles toward log cabins...