The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America

Abstract

The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America. GEORGE R. MILNER. Thames and Hudson, New York, 2004. 224 pp., 153 figures, notes, biblio., index. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-500-02118-X. Reviewed by John H. Blitz This beautiful volume is a welcome addition to Thames and Hudson's Ancient Peoples and Places Series. The founding editor of the series, the late Glyn Daniel, was an old-school scholar from archaeology's humanities wing. Under his guidance, the series produced authoritative overviews of ancient cultures representative of high civilization. Daniel once dismissed ancient North America by claiming that centuries nothing happened of general interest to the student of world history-no Stonehenge, no Maltese temples (A Short History of Archaeology, Thames and Hudson, 1981, p. 190). In the years since that pronouncement, archaeologists have confirmed that native peoples of eastern North America fostered independent plant domestication, created monumental mounds as old as Stonehenge, and built settlements with evidence of social and political complexity. The need for a concise and readable summary of this subject is long overdue. Almost all book-length summaries of eastern North American prehistory are encyclopedic tomes bristling with innumerable phases, foci, cultures, and artifact classifications, verbal barrages that turn general readers off. Fortunately, George Milner has jettisoned the jargon. Written in a clear economical style, the book provides answers to what nonspecialists most want to know: What have the archaeologists found and what do these remains tell us about life in the past? Appropriately, the volume is descriptive, but it is much more than just a compendium of facts. Eight chapters cover segments of culture history in chronological order. Each chapter is lavishly illustrated with high-quality black-and-white and color illustrations of site maps, artifacts, excavations, features, and artist's interpretations of everyday life; scanned versions will soon appear in PowerPoint presentations near you. Throughout the volume, insert boxes give in-depth coverage of special topics; Population Growth, Moving Earth at Poverty Point, and Mesoamerican Contacts? are examples. Because mound building is the theme, temporal and geographical coverage is uneven, with the late prehistory of Midwestern and Southeastern societies receiving emphasis. useful preface contains a chronological table and clarifies how archaeologists use calendar and radiocarbon dates. Chapter 1, A Heavily Forested and Thinly Peopled Land, introduces the natural environment and offers a synopsis of how archaeology developed from an antiquarian pursuit to a scientific endeavor. The chapter reveals Milner's theoretical orientation. He proposes relationships between climate, natural resources, and population growth. These changing factors created the problems and opportunities that motivated the technological and social responses that shaped culture change. Such explanations are familiar territory for archaeologists. Chapter 2 is an evenhanded review of Paleoindian archaeology. There is no endorsement of pre-Clovis sites, and the megafauna overkill hypothesis gets skeptical treatment. Chapter 3, Sedentary Hunter-Gatherers: Middle to Late Archaic, covers key topics such as the beginnings of plant domestication, the sedentarism afforded by increased use of aquatic foods, and the link between the first mound building and group territories. Nothing is this chapter is unexpected, except perhaps the recent finding that interpersonal violence during these periods was far more common than previously realized. Milner connects the formation of exchange networks to gift giving as a means to create allies and avoid conflicts. The diversity of burial mounds, mortuary treatments, and earthworks in Early to Middle Woodland societies is presented in chapter 4. …