Details

ISBN-10: 0812222237
ISBN-13: 9780812222234
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Publish Date: 12/13/2012
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 0.60" H

Zamumo’s Gifts: Indian-European Exchange in the Colonial Southeast

byJR

Paperback

Price: $24.95

Overview

In 1540, Zamumo, the chief of the Altamahas in central Georgia, exchanged gifts with the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto. With these gifts began two centuries of exchanges that bound American Indians and the Spanish, English, and French who colonized the region. Whether they gave gifts for diplomacy or traded commodities for profit, Natives and newcomers alike used the exchange of goods such as cloth, deerskin, muskets, and sometimes people as a way of securing their influence. Gifts and trade enabled early colonies to survive and later colonies to prosper. Conversely, they upset the social balance of chiefdoms like Zamumo’s and promoted the rise of new and powerful Indian confederacies like the Creeks and the Choctaws.

Drawing on archaeological studies, colonial documents from three empires, and Native oral histories, Joseph M. Hall, Jr., offers fresh insights into broad segments of southeastern colonial history, including the success of Florida’s Franciscan missionaries before 1640 and the impact of the Indian slave trade on French Louisiana after 1699. He also shows how gifts and trade shaped the Yamasee War, which pitted a number of southeastern tribes against English South Carolina in 1715-17. The exchanges at the heart of Zamumo’s Gifts highlight how the history of Europeans and Native Americans cannot be understood without each other.

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Reviews

A fascinating, well-researched, and extremely well-written volume that accomplishes a great deal. . . . This book will most certainly have immense and immediate impacts on historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and others interested in the nature of exchange in the colonial Southeast.–American Historical Review

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Details

ISBN-10: 0812222237
ISBN-13: 9780812222234
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Publish Date: 12/13/2012
Dimensions: 8.90" L, 6.00" W, 0.60" H
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