You Have Guns And So Have We...: An Ethnohistoric Analysis Of Creek And Seminole Combat Behaviors

Resistance to oppression is a globally recognized cultural phenomenon that displays a remarkable amount of variation in its manifestations over both time and space. This cultural phenomenon is particularly evident among the Native American cultural groups of the Southeastern United States. Throughout the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries the European and American states employed tactics and implemented laws aimed at expanding the geographic boundaries of their respective states into the Tribal Zone of the Southeast. None of these groups, however, sat passively during this process; they employed resistive tactics and strategies aimed at maintaining their freedoms, their lives, and their traditional sociocultural structures. However, the resistive tactics and strategies, primarily manifested in the medium of warfare, have gone relatively unnoticed by scholars of the disciplines of history and anthropology, typically regarded simply as guerrilla in nature. This research presents a new analytical model that is useful in qualitatively and quantitatively analyzing the behaviors employed in combat scenarios. Using the combat behaviors of Muskhogean speaking cultural groups as a case study, such as the Creeks and Seminoles and their Protohistoric predecessors, this model has shown that indigenous warfare in this region was complex, dynamic, and adaptive. This research has further implications in that it has documented the evolution of Seminole combat behaviors into the complex and dynamic behaviors that were displayed during the infamous Second iv Seminole War. Furthermore, the model used in this research provides a fluid and adaptive base for the analysis of the combat behaviors of other cultural groups worldwide

A Multi-Proxy Assessment of the Impact of Environmental Instability on Late Holocene (4500-3800 BP) Native American Villages of the Georgia Coast

Circular shell rings along the South Atlantic Coast of North America are the remnants of some of the earliest villages that emerged during the Late Archaic (5000-3000 BP). Many of these villages, however, were abandoned during the Terminal Late Archaic (ca 3800-3000 BP). We combine Bayesian chronological modeling with mollusk shell geochemistry and oyster paleobiology to understand the nature and timing of environmental change associated with the emergence and abandonment of circular shell ring villages on Sapelo Island, Georgia. Our Bayesian models indicate that Native Americans occupied the three Sapelo shell rings at varying times with some generational overlap. By the end of the complex\u27s occupation, only Ring III was occupied before abandonment ca. 3845 BP. Ring III also consists of statistically smaller oysters harvested from less saline estuaries compared to earlier occupations. Integrating shell biochemical and paleobiological data with recent tree ring analyses shows a clear pattern of environmental fluctuations throughout the period in which the rings were occupied. We argue that as the environment became unstable around 4300 BP, aggregation at villages provided a way to effectively manage fisheries that are highly sensitive to environmental change. However, with the eventual collapse of oyster fisheries and subsequent rebound in environmental conditions ca. post-3800 BP, people dispersed from shell rings, and shifted to non-marine subsistence economies and other types of settlements. This study provides the most comprehensive evidence for correlations between large-scale environmental change and societal transformations on the Georgia coast during the Late Archaic period

Native and African cultures and their resistance to oppression in Florida prior to 1850

Resistance to oppression is a phenomenon that occurs world-wide and that shows remarkable variation in its manifestations over both time and space, This social phenomenon was particularly evident among Native Americans and Africans in the United States, where, during the period from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, Europeans and Americans employed strategies and implemented laws designed to subjugate both ethnic groups, Resistance strategies ranged on a continuum from suicide to maronnage (the act of obtaining freedom from slavery by means of fleeing a plantation) to open warfare, This study provides an historical overview of the oppressive tactics or strategies employed by both Europeans and Americans in subjugating Native Americans and Africans within the boundaries of modern Florida, and a quantitative analysis of the resistive strategies with which the oppressed responded, This quantitative analysis was achieved through the use of a model I developed for looking at specific battlefield tactics utilized by both the Native Americans and Africans in Florida, Ethnographic data pertaining to the social, political and economic lives of Native Americans of Florida and the affiliated cultures of the Africans, free and bound, in Florida provides a cultural context that will allow us to better understand the strategies they employed in resisting their oppression, By analyzing the resistive tactics employed by both Native Americans and Africans against the oppressive tactics utilized by Europeans and Americans in the subjugation of these two groups in Florida, I was able to provide further insight into the cultural component of warfare. Due to the Eurocentric process of structural amnesia, this cultural component has been largely overlooked by many scholars