Reviewed by: Fit for War: Sustenance and Order in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Catawba Nation by Mary Elizabeth Fitts Bryan C. Rindfleisch Fit for War: Sustenance and Order in the Mid-Eighteenth-Century Catawba Nation. By Mary Elizabeth Fitts. Florida Museum of Natural History: Ripley P. Bullen Series. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, 2017. Pp. xvi, 256. $79.95, ISBN 978-1-68340-005-9.) Mary Elizabeth Fitts, a research associate with the Research Laboratories of Archaeology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, combines historical documentation and archaeological evidence to provide a narrative account of how the modern Catawba Nation coalesced in the mid-eighteenth century. In particular, she demonstrates how a multitude of indigenous groups from around the South—the Charraw, Saponi, Wateree, Sugaree, Yssa, Catapa, and Congaree, among others—merged with the Native peoples of the Piedmont region to create the Catawba Nation in a process that started near the turn of the eighteenth century and concluded with the Seven Years' War. As Fitts argues, this polyglot indigenous community experienced both centralization and ethnogenesis—the creation of a distinctly Catawba polity and identity—as a consequence of its relationship with the colony of South Carolina. Specifically, the main catalyst for such processes stemmed from the "militarization" of Catawba communities during the mid-eighteenth century, given that Catawba peoples acted as the auxiliaries for Carolina in its various conflicts with the French and Spanish, which triggered what Fitts calls "settlement aggregation" and the genesis of a Catawba nation (p. 2). Fitts asserts that coalescence and ethnogenesis also produced unforeseen changes within the Catawba economy and foodways, which, when combined with droughts, settler encroachments, and Iroquois and Shawnee raids during the Seven Years' War, exacerbated a "food security crisis between 1755 and 1759" that nearly crippled the Catawba (p. 2). Altogether, Fitts provides an authoritative account of how the Catawba Nation came to be in the mid-eighteenth century, which scholars have not previously fully understood or realized. The strongest contributions that Fitts offers to our understandings of Native American and southern history relate to the evidence gathered at the archaeological excavations of two Catawba communities, Nassaw-Weyapee and Charraw Town. For example, Fitts utilizes faunal remains, pottery sherds, macrobotanical refuse, pipe stems, post holes, glass beads, metal jewelry, and other objects to supplement what historians know about the Catawba from the documentary record. Using both source bases, Fitts identifies the migrant peoples who composed the modern Catawba Nation and traces where they came from. She also illustrates the shift in Catawba pottery production from a "household craft" to a "collaborative craft," a testament to the centralization and coalescence of Catawba peoples during the mid-eighteenth century (pp. 56, 202). Further, Fitts deploys plant and animal remains to recreate Catawba foodways and to articulate "the effects of Catawba militarism on subsistence activities," which led to the food scarcity crisis of 1755–1759 that "had dire consequences for the Nation" (pp. 245, 307). Such insights alone make this book a worthy addition to scholarship on Native American and southern history. With that said, this book is very narrow in scope and time, which can be problematic for some readers. Whereas other scholars such as James H. Merrell [End Page 709] have charted the trajectory of Catawba history over the course of centuries, Fitts is primarily concerned with a few decades, particularly between the 1720s and the 1760s. While she makes a convincing case for why this short period is important to our understandings of the modern Catawba Nation, she ignores subsequent decades and events—such as the expulsion of the French and Spanish from the South in 1763, Catawba involvement in the American Revolution, the continued relationship between the Catawba Nation and South Carolina after 1783, and a host of other examples during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—that forced the Catawba peoples to evolve even more as a distinct polity. This book, then, is more about the origins of the Catawba Nation than a history of the modern Catawba people. Bryan C. Rindfleisch Marquette University Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association