Animals and Animality in Eastern Woodland Societies, livre ebook

Exploring how humans and animals in the US Southeast interacted to shape social, ritual, and cosmological worlds across thousands of years

Archaeologists often approach the study of animals mainly as evidence of human diet or ecology, but this volume highlights the broader significance of animals across what is now the US Southeast from the Woodland period through the post-contact era. Drawing on archaeological, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic sources, contributors examine how animals shaped human identities, rituals, and social structures as seen in art, oral traditions, daily practices, and ceremonial roles.

In this volume, case studies reveal diverse expressions of human–animal relationships—in Mississippian ceramics, shell reef symbolism, deer antlers used in Powhatan rituals, the protective burial of chickens by enslaved communities, and more. These examples challenge rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman and move beyond traditional Western binaries that position animals as less than humans. This volume engages with non-Western and Indigenous-informed perspectives that recognize animals as cosmologically, politically, and socially significant beings. It explores animality as a dynamic, relational category and contributes to wider debates on materiality, agency, and ontology in archaeology.

List of Illustrations

Chapter 1. Defining Animality in Eastern Woodland Contexts
Jessica A. Jenkins and Neill J. Wallis

Part 1. Animals in Eastern Woodland Art and Iconography

Chapter 2. Birds of a Feather? Animals and Early Villages of the Woodland Period (1000 BCE–1050 CE) on the Gulf Coast of Florida
Thomas J. Pluckhahn

Chapter 3. Human and Animal Intersubjectivity in Woodland Period Art of Florida and the Deep South
Neill J. Wallis

Chapter 4. Middle Woodland Communities’ Classification of Animals: A Perspective Based on Hopewell Effigy Platform Pipes
Bretton T. Giles

Part 2. Shells and Shellfish Beyond Subsistence

Chapter 5. Shells and Their Death/New Life Symbolism in Eastern North American Cultures
Cheryl Claassen

Chapter 6. The Worlds Are Your Oyster
Jessica A. Jenkins

Part 3. Animality, Ritual Specialists, and Embodiment

Chapter 7. The Spirit of Becoming and the Power to Change: Deer Antlers in the Native Chesapeake
Martin Gallivan and John Henshaw

Chapter 8. Examining the Roles of Ritual Specialists in the Lower Mississippi Valley During the Late Woodland Period Through Animal and Plant Remains
Ashley Peles, Megan C. Kassabaum, and Vincas P. Steponaitis

Part 4. Animals and Enslavement in Historical Contexts

Chapter 9. When Animals Speak: Evidence of Animality from the Prospect Hill Plantation in Jefferson County, Mississippi
Shawn P. Lambert

List of Contributors

Index